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Put a digital camera next to a camera that still uses film, if you can find a new camera that still uses film. How are they different? Some digital cameras are dead ringers for the 35mm SLR (single-lens reflex) that dominated photography for professionals as well as everyman for more than half a century.
Nevertheless, a lot of the digital cameras are smaller than any film cameras you'll see outside of a spy movie. A few have some bizarre touches. One twists so that half the camera is at a right angle to rest of it. Some Kodaks have two lenses. Other digitals have abandoned the traditional boxy shape and taken on the forms of credit cards or a child's pencil holder. Still others hide within phones, watches, and binoculars. However odd their housings might be, digital cameras externally retain much in common with their film ancestors. They both have lenses, some sort of viewfinders to peer through, and similar assortments of buttons and knobs.
The important difference between film and digital cameras is not in their shapes, but what the cameras hide inside. Take off the back of a film camera, and you'll see a couple of slots at one end where you insert your canister of film and an empty spool on the other end to take up the roll of film as each frame is exposed. Between them, directly inline with the lens, is the pressure plate. It provides a smooth, flat surface for the film to rest against. In front of the pressure plate is a shutter made of cloth or metal sheets that open quickly to expose the film and then close just as quickly so the film doesn't get too much light. Some cameras have shutters in the lens, but you can forget that fact without any ill consequences.
Take a digital camera and open up the back—you can't! There is no way to open it and see what's inside. That's what this section is for, to show you what you ordinarily can't see on your own.
Professional photographer's tips to portrait, lanscape and wedding photo shooting
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