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Single lens reflex (SLR) A camera which views the subject through the lens via a mirror.
	Lens 45 degree reflex mirror Film Pentaprism Eye-level viewfinder

A Little Camera History...

Throughout the history of the humanity, people have been collectors. We collect anything that catches our eye, or that we can afford. There are however, some things that we simply can’t collect, like a sunset, or a forest, or the vastness of the ocean. We, being an industrious society, invented something- Painting. This was the only way to bring a far away sea or entire village into our dwellings. For thousands of years we painted and painted. We can find paintings in caves, on house walls, inside pyramids and even on the floors walked on by ancient civilizations. But there were some drawbacks to this new painting idea. First, it was expensive, and secondly, you had to be very talented to depict a 3-d image onto a flat canvas or wall. Again we got to thinking, and we invented something new, a mere toy, but the beginning of a revolution. We had invented the camera obscura.

The camera obscura was a clever little invention used by artists to convert a 3-D image into a 2-D one. It was poorly documented and we don’t know when or by who it was invented. In 1267 we can read a vague account an instrument that was used to view pictures by Roger Bacon, but there was no detailed account of the Camera Obscura. The first description of the Camera Obsucra was made by Leonardo da Vinci in the early years of the sixteenth century. In his famous notebooks he documented and showed how to make and use a camera obscura, but did not take the credit for the invention.

The camera obscura was a primitive form of a modern camera.

The next big leap towards turning a box with a hole in it into a camera was made by John Baptista Porta. In 1553 he published a work called Natural Magic. In this work, John mentioned the camera obscura, but did no further altercations on the camera. The box started to evolve when it fell into the hands of Daniel Barbaro in 1568. Daniel also published a book called Practice of Perspective which explained how a smaller hole world create a sharper image on the screen, and how moving the screen closer to the hole, he could create a sharper image. Daniel Barbaro was the inventor of the lens for use in the camera obscura. These are some of his notes on its invention:

1. Seeing, therefore, on the paper the outline of things, you can draw with a Pencil all the perspective and shading and coloring, according to nature.
2. You should choose the glass (lens) which does the best, and you should cover it so much that you leave a little in the middle clear and open and you will see a still brighter affect.

The lens that Daniel used was a convex lens from a pair of glasses. He tried a concave lens but it wouldn’t work. Still this much more evolved form of the camera was only considered a novelty for use by an artist.

The next big advancement of the camera obscura was the astronomer Johann Kepler. In 1611 he wrote a book called the Dioptrice. He wrote many laws, which cracked the mystery, of why the image was backwards. He also discovered that two lenses would allow more control of the size of the image being projected. Johann also named our little box the Camera Obscura. Because of him, lenses were now being designed specifically for the purpose of the camera obscura.

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