Parts of a camera - Inside the camera

Here are some photos of the inside of my Nikon F3 film camera.

The silver ring you see is where the lens attaches to the camera. In Nikon cameras, this is called the F-Mount. The nice thing about Nikon is that the mount has stayed the same since March 3, 1959 when it was introduced with the Nikon F camera.

The F-Mount is still being used today in Nikon's DSLR cameras. So those 50 year old lenses can fit and be used in modern DSLR cameras. Even though they will fit all Nikon DSLR cameras, only the higher end Nikon DSLR will actually support some of the feature of the old lenses.

So the lens I have shown in my previous post will fit any Nikon camera, but I have to manually focus and manually adjust all the aperture and shutter speed.

Here you can see the mirror inside the camera. What this mirror does is to show you what the lens sees exactly. The beauty of an SLR camera is that you can see exactly through the lens. That means, the photo you shoot is exactly as how you see it.

Unlike point and shoot cameras, you can't see directly through the lens because the viewfinder is offset above or to the side of the lens. So there is what we call parallax. What it is is that what you see in the viewfinder and the photo you have taken is not exactly right.

When you are taking a photo of a landscape, this may not be a big deal. But for close up shots and when you have the subject very near the edge of the viewfinder, you might find your subject cut off in the actual photograph. This is because of parallax.

The advantage of the SLR camera is that there is no parallax so you won't cut your subject off.

This is the back of the camera where the film goes in. The knob on the upper left where the pen is pointed at is the cover release. You basically just pull it up and the cover pops open.

Here you see the cover open.

This is what it looks like inside and this is where the film goes.

DSLR cameras pretty much have the same internals except that instead of film, you have a sensor and electronics for the sensor. The back doesn't pop out of course since there is no need to change films, what you have instead is a compartment for the memory cards.

That's it for now, more on my next post.