How do cameras work?

Digital cameras are everywhere nowadays. In phones, in tablets and in computers.

But how do they actually work?

Well, light goes into the lens and lands on a small sensor. The sensor is divided into millions of tiny squares – or pixels as they’re called.

Each little square is a bit like a solar panel. You know that a solar panel takes light and makes it into electricity? Well the same thing is going on in your camera. As the image hits the sensor, each square gets a different electrical charge depending on the brightness and colour of the light hitting it.

The computer in the camera takes the grid of electrical charges and converts them into a picture. It’s recorded as a computer file so it can be accessed as many times as you like and moved around.

Different cameras have different amounts of squares. ‘Mega’ means million, so a two megapixel camera has two million pixels – or squares, on its sensor.