Camera lenses vs human eyes

There are many similarities between a camera lens and the human eye. Of course, they both have distinct features too.
Join us as we take a look at the makeup of each, their way of functioning and what makes them unique.

THE CAMERA LENS

Design
A collection of small glass parts make up a camera lens and are used to focus light onto a light-sensitive surface.
There is also an adjustable hole on the lens called the aperture, which controls just how much light can enter the lens at any one time.
All camera lenses are curved. This is to take into account light at different angles - after all, light must be directed to the camera's focal point to capture an image.

Types
There are many different types of camera lens, ranging from simple designs to the more complex options:
• A single-element convex lens is the simplest form of a camera lens. It is designed to be thick in the middle and tapered along the ends. You can find a similar setup in a magnifying glass.
• A normal lens benefits from having a wider angle of view but items in the distance are not capable of being magnified.
• A wide-angle lens is great when you want to achieve a distorted, bulging effect with your photos. This is because the lens is more curved and its focal length is shorter - two elements that results in a greater angle of incidence.
• A telephoto lens is designed with a longer distance from the front of the lens to the focal plane and from the focal plane to the image sensor. Increased lengths mean that elements off in the distance can be focused on more accurately.
• A zoom lens comes with a zoom ring, which can be used to change focal length and the overall configuration of a lens' elements. The result is great magnification capabilities.

How the camera lens works
This graphic by Clifton Cameras provides an easy-to-follow guide of how a camera lens works:

THE HUMAN EYE
A good way to look at the human eye is to split up its elements.

The pupil
A hole positioned at the front of the eyeball which enables light to enter.

The iris
The coloured portion of the eyeball. This helps to control how much light can enter - similar to the aperture on a camera lens.

The walls
The walls of the eye are split into a trio of distinct layers - the coloured iris, the internal retina and the white sclera.

The retina
A surface at the back of the eye where light is focussed onto. The retina will detect the light and then direct messages to the brain for a response.

Photoreceptors
There are more than one million light-sensitive cells in a single human eye: these are split into two designs. Rod photoreceptors allow the eye to see in areas of low light, while cone photoreceptors are for times when light is bright. Cone photoreceptors also enable human eyes to distinguish colours.

How the human eye works
Clifton Cameras has also provided a step-by-step guide to how all of the elements of a human eye work together:

Cedric Roux: Before Rebirth

By Cedric Roux

Publisher : ODYSSEE

2024 | 96 pages

Empty storefronts dot the downtown, while massive brick tobacco warehouses stretch the length of city blocks—abandoned and awaiting creative reuse. Wilson, North Carolina, feels frozen in the 1970s. Invited by the Eye on Main Street festival, photographer Cedric Roux made several trips to this enigmatic town. For a photographer used to capturing the vibrant energy of New York City streets—his first book, My Wonderland (now sold out), vividly chronicled the bustling metropolis—his initial encounter with Wilson was a profound shock.

Expecting a town in the midst of a vibrant renaissance, Roux wandered Wilson daily, exploring its diverse areas: downtown, affluent suburbs, and struggling neighborhoods. On either side of the railroad tracks that symbolically and socially divide the city, he sought a light that might suggest an emerging revival..

In his latest book, Before Rebirth, Roux captures this sense of disconnection, using his lens to explore a promise not yet realized. With a population of just 47,000, Wilson is a far cry from Manhattan’s 1.5 million. Used to the dense human energy that fuels his photographic style, Roux found himself reimagining his approach. His work took on a more stripped-down, documentary aesthetic, yet it remains deeply rooted in place and retains the distinctive palette and framing that define his vision..

In collaboration with artistic director Jean-Matthieu Gautier, Roux drew from his imagination and visual archives to craft a narrative that stays true to his photographic roots while stepping far beyond his usual realm.

All About Cedric Roux

John Divola: San Fernando Valley

By John Divola

Publisher : Nazraeli Press

2024 | 60 pages

From the publisher: San Fernando Valley is where John Divola was born and raised, and it served as both backdrop and subject for his earliest, serious photographic explorations, made during the early 1970s. This previously unpublished body of work shows “the Valley” through the eyes of a young photographer who would soon become an internationally-recognized artist with the exhibition and publication of his much more conceptual “Zuma” series. The black and white photographs in “San Fernando Valley” comprise a series of subject groupings which, pulled together, show early manifestations of the deadpan humor and the ability to capture everyday scenes wrapped in loneliness, for which Divola is now well-known. The book is also, and not incidentally, a fascinating record of a quintessentially 1970s Los Angeles culture. John Divola’s work is the subject of numerous books and catalogues. Widely exhibited and collected throughout the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia, Divola’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of many public and private institutions, including those of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

All About John Divola

Cig Harvey: Emerald Drifters

By Cig Harvey

Publisher : The Monacelli Press

2025 | 224 pages

Following her celebrated monograph Blue Violet (Monacelli, 2021), photographer Cig Harvey continues her personal study of sensory experience, focusing on the ephemeral nature of light, pigment, and vision. Her latest photographs are lush tableaux of her signature subjects – flora, cakes, domestic interiors, and the human figure in landscape – accompanied by prose vignettes on the science and art of color, written in her vibrant, intimate style. Featuring an afterword by award-winning novelist and poet Ocean Vuong, Emerald Drifters is a catalogue of pleasures and heartbreaks, and ‘an urgent call to live.’

All About Cig Harvey

Helmut Newton. Berlin, Berlin

By Helmut Newton

Publisher : Taschen

2025 | 244 pages

Born in Berlin in 1920, Helmut Newton trained as a teenager with legendary photographer Yva, following her lead into the enticing pastures of fashion, portraiture and nudes. Forced to flee the Nazis aged only 18, Newton never left Berlin behind. After his career exploded in Paris in the 1960s, he returned regularly to shoot for magazines like Constanze, Adam, Vogue, Condé Nast's Traveler, ZEITmagazin, Männer Vogue, Max and the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin as well as his own magazine Helmut Newton’s Illustrated. In 1979, the newly relaunched German Vogue commissioned him to retrace the footsteps of his youth to capture the fashion moment. The resulting portfolio, Berlin, Berlin!, inspired the title of the exhibition which celebrates 20 years of the Helmut Newton Foundation. This collection includes Newton’s most iconic Berlin images, as well as many unknown shots from the 1930s to the 2000s: nightcrawlers in uber-cool clubs and restaurants, nude portraits in the boarding houses he knew from his youth, and the Berlin film scene, featuring Hanna Schygulla and Wim Wenders at the Berlin Wall, John Malkovich and David Bowie. In October 2003, only months before his death, Newton moved large parts of his archive to his new foundation, housed in the Museum of Photography beside the Zoologischer Garten station―the very station from which he fled Berlin in the winter of 1938. This publication thus closes a circle in the story of his extraordinary life and work.

Camera lenses vs human eyes

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