Cameras and Lenses (2020)
The image sensor of a digital camera consists of a grid of photodetectors. A photodetector converts photons into electric current that can be measured – the more photons hitting the detector the higher the signal. In the demonstration below you can observe how photons fall onto the arrangement of detectors represented by small squares. After some processing, the value read by each detector is converted to the brightness of the resulting image pixels which you can see on the right side. I’m also symbolically showing which photosite was hit with a short highlight. The slider below controls the flow of time: The longer the time of collection of photons the more of them are hitting the detectors and the brighter the resulting pixels in the image. When we don’t gather enough…
