A Beautiful Visualization Of How Your DSLR Camera Really Works

Via fastcodesign

Here’s the thing about expensive, hulking DSLR cameras: They take beautiful photographs, but only if you know how to use them. And understanding the various settings—adjusting shutter speed and aperture, monitoring exposure—is confusing, even to seasoned professionals. “Even speaking to a photographer friend of mine who works for a pretty prestigious company in London,” says Simon Roberts, “he spent a lot of university struggling to understand how his camera operated.”

Roberts, a freelance graphic designer and animator was having his own problems about four years ago, when he was teaching himself to use DSLR for motion graphic projects. His recently launched project Photography-Mapped includes a beautifully designed, screen-printed printed graphic that diagrams the features of a DSLR camera and clarifies how they work in conjunction. He’s also created a clever interactive graphic on the site that operates as sort of a testing ground for DSLR—with sliders that demonstrate what exactly happens when you adjust exposure.

For Roberts, the common way of depicting camera exposure in an “exposure triangle”—basically a triangulated coordinate graph with aperture, shutter and sensor as the three axises—was too complicated (it is, take a look). Other metaphors, like one that uses buckets of water to illustrate the three exposure settings—here it is in Photography for Dummies—weren’t that helpful either. One thing they were all missing, it seemed to Roberts, was the element of time, an important factor in photography that’s virtually impossible to include in a static diagram.

So he set out to simplify the concept of exposure with his own diagram, then animated it to be used as a digital tool. Taking inspiration from Harry Beck’s London Underground map, which is celebrated for its simplicity and still used today, Roberts pared down and organized the information needed to use DSLR into an easily comprehendible graphic. A minimal, two-color depiction of a camera shows the different physical pieces, and four columns break out how the lens, aperture, shutter, and sensor work. A section on light details in clear, concise language why exposure is important and how it is measured. A final column describes what the final image actually is: “Captured light, converted to numbers, displayed as pixels.”