The camera game.

Let's play a game. Let's pretend we are human cameras. Well, really just our heads are the cameras. Our eyes are the lens of our camera and our brain is the film. Pretend your body is the tripod that holds the camera.

Now, close your eyes. Turn your camera to face something you want to take a picture of. Open your eyes quickly and close them again. What did you see? Can you recall much detail of the picture you just took? Describe the details you remember, the objects in your picture, their color, the direction of the light. What do you remember the best--are they the brightest objects?

When your eyelids opened and closed, they acted like the shutter of a camera. The shutter lets light in and exposes the film. When you took your first picture with your human camera, were you in a well-lit place? With a real camera, the shutter opens and closes quickly when there is lots of light, like outside in the sunshine. If it was night time, your shutter must stay open longer to gather more light because it is dark.

Behind the shutter of a camera is the aperture, or opening. Opened wide, the aperture lets in a lot of light, while a small opening lets in very little light. Behind your eyelids, in the center of your eyes, is your pupil. It is the black in the center of the colored iris. The pupil opens wider to let in more light, or closes down to keep the light from being too bright.

When the first photography experiments took place in France in 1827, it took eight hours to make a picture. Whatever was being photographed had to hold still for eight hours or the subject would be blurred. Today, the speed of film (how sensitive it is to light) has improved along with photographic equipment. Today's cameras have shutter speeds that can open and close in a fraction of a second. Your brain, which acts like the film in our human camera, acts like very sensitive film. What you can remember when your eyelids open and close is like exposing film to light. You are a human camera.

For a photographer, the speed of the film, the size of the aperture and the speed of the shutter are all parts of what must be considered in order to take a properly exposed photograph. Aren't we lucky that our human camera is smarter?