Photography

So this is the process for black and white pictures. It's similar for color pictures, but it involves more colors and is more difficult.

Your camera has an aperature (a small opening) for the light from the lense to hit your film. You might have heard of a camera obscura, that's how the camera gets the picture into the camera. Inside the camera, you have your film. This film is photosensitive, the image that gets through the aperature (for a specific amount of time) is burnt into the film, kinda like a sun burn on skin: The areas exposed to more light (brighter part of your subject) get burnt more, the darker areas (exposed to less light) not as much.

The aperature and shutter speed determine how much light hits your film, and the best value depend on your film. (See ISO numbers).

Then you go into a darkroom, a room completely sealed off from light, except for a red lamp, which does not affect the film. There, you can open the film, and cure it. By curing the film (I'm not sure that's the right word, but I hope you get the idea), it stops changing with exposure to more light. In practice, you dunk your film in a chemical bath for a certain amount of time, at a certain temperature and all that.

Once your film is cured, the film is your negative. Bright and dark are flipped. A white wall appears black, a chocolate donut appears white. Now you wash your negative to get rid of the chemicals you just used, and dry your film.

Once your film is developed and dry, you take it to the light machine (still in the dark room). A light machine looks a little bit like a microscope, but instead of light shining from underneath, it shines from above, through your negative, and hits photo paper. This is where what you understand as photo editing happens, for the most part.

The light machine is like a projector. The light shines through the film and onto your photo paper. Here, again, you deal with exposure, the amount of light you expose your photo to, and again this reverses the black/white "colors". More light from the light machine, and your photo paper becomes over exposed (too dark). Too little light, and its under exposed (too bright).

While developing your picture, you can compensate somewhat for defects you found in your film, but the film is ultimately where your image comes from, so it makes sense to kinda know what settings lead to what effects. You can also shrink or increase your picture, since the light machine works like a projector. The closer the light machine's film is to the photo paper, the smaller the photo, the farther away the picture is from the film, the bigger the picture. You can also blur the edges, expose only parts of the film, or double expose your film (for example by using half the light from the light machine and using two negatives for one photo).

Then you douse the photo paper in a chemical bath, rinse it, and dry it.

Going through this a couple hundred or thousand times, you get good at building up an intuition for what picture to take, with an idea of what you're gonna do in the light room.

Photography is an awesome activity. Developing pictures was my favorite thing to do in High School, and I encourage you to take a college class in B/W photography, it's a lot of fun, you'll learn about optics, and how to compose and process your shots, and in the end you end up with cool pictures you can gift for Christmas. You might even get to go on cool field trips.