Greetings again my dear readers, we continue with our task of visualizing our extraordinary environment with the purpose of being able to locate the different technological applications that have great influence in our lives, this leads us to continue highlighting the wonderful link between science and technology, and with it affirming that technology is applied science, aspect that we have verified in each one of the previous articles.

Each learning extracted from our natural environment man through his ingenuity has been able to transform it into different devices or artificial tools very useful for the development of any type of our activities, among these tools we find the essential optical instruments which have extraordinary elements such as lenses, prisms and mirrors.

With the optical elements mentioned above (lenses, prisms and mirrors) it has been possible to conform wonderful complex optical systems such as cameras, and we know that this optical instrument has great utility and popularity in our modern lifestyle, we could say that at present every human being could take a capture of a certain space-time of his life, and this has been able to immortalize thanks to the application of cameras.

In previous articles we had related to this type of optical instrument, however, in this opportunity we will analyze its essential optical system because it represents the main structure in charge of the treatment of the light rays that transport any type of image coming from our environment, and this optical system is composed by a series of optical elements, for example, we will analyze a reflex camera which has, lenses, mirror and a pentaprism, as you can see in the following figure 1.

Figure 1. Optical system of a camera

We will begin to analyze the optical elements found in the photographic lens or objective, then you can see the set of optical elements that make up a photographic lens or objective in the following figure 2.

Figure 2. Part of the Optical System of a Camera (Lens)

From the previous figure 2, we will begin analyzing the lens and it has a series of lenses among which are the plano-convex, biconvex and biconcave lens, the first two belong to the family of convergent lenses and the third to the family of divergent lenses, these lenses have flat or spherical curves characteristic that gives them the name, the functions of the plano-convex and biconvex lenses is to converge as much as possible to the light rays that affect them, while the biconcave lens performs the opposite function.

Conclusion

Many are the contributions that we can continue pointing out regarding the different technological applications created and used by man to be able to cover a certain task in particular, as it is the case of the famous and recognized photographic cameras and their essential optical system composed by extraordinary elements such as lenses, mirrors and prisms, and in this way they have allowed us to be able to capture a certain space-time of our lives and immortalize them.

With this article in its first part we continue pointing out the great impact that each technological application has in our existence, this time we analyze in a general way to an optical component of the lens of an SLR camera and this at the same time (lens) is part of the whole optical system of that optical instrument before mentioned.

Until another opportunity my dear and appreciated readers.

Note: The images are of my authorship, made using the Power Point application, and the animated gif was made with the Photoscape application.

Recommended Bibliographic Reference

[1]Basic principles of photography.