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You don’t need to be an electrical engineer to be a good photographer, but it helps to have at least a rudimentary understanding of how cameras, lenses, and exposure work.
Lots of people find cameras to be mysterious contraptions packed with circuits and sensors that somehow spit out photos. When we charge the battery and press the shutter, we know that we’re going to get a photograph, but the process by which that photograph is created is a total mystery to most people.
To start at the beginning, the word camera comes from “camera obscura” which is Latin for dark chamber. An early mechanism for projecting images onto paper so that they could be traced, the camera obscura eventually led to the development of the camera as we know it today, a device used to capture visual images with a medium that can record light intensity — either film negatives or digital sensors.