In Photography, Our Lens Is Like Our Eye

he In Photography Our Lens Is Like Our Eye

Overview

During the Introduction To Photography class, we talk about aperture. To be clear, the aperture is also known as f-stop. Furthermore, the aperture is an opening in the lens that we can make bigger or smaller.

While we can talk about aperture controlling our composition in a number of ways, one of the ways we talk about aperture is in terms of controlling tonality, or the brightness of our picture.

More to the point of this post, we control tonality with our lens by increasing or decreasing exposure. That increase or decrease of exposure effects the digital sensor or film (light-sensitive material) contained in our camera. And the light-sensitive material in our camera could be compared to the retina of our eye.

Specifically, we increase or decrease tonality by increasing or decreasing exposure through our lens. And we increase or decrease exposure through our lens making the physical size of the aperture bigger or smaller.

In order to help us understand photography, we can think of the aperture in our lens as something similar to the Iris/Pupil of our eye. In addition, as previously mentioned, we can think of the light-sensitive material contained in our camera as the retina in our eye.

Our Eye

When our eye encounters bright (more intense) light our pupil constricts to expose our retina to less light. On the other hand, when our eye encounters less intense light, our pupil dilates to expose our retina to more light. This is an automatic response of our eye that allows us to see under varying intensities of light.

Our Lens

Depending on the exposure mode that we use on our camera, controlling exposure with our lens may happen automatically, or we may have to do it manually.