The light that passes through a tiny hole in a wall creates an upside-down image of the scenery outside on the opposite wall of the room. Medieval European artists would capture such images on their canvases, tracing the details to make accurate sketches.

The word "camera," in fact, derives from "camera obscura," the Latin term that the artists coined for such devices, which they used as an aid to creating their works. "Camera" means "room," while "obscura" means "ambiguous, dark." In short, cameras owe their name to a "dark room."

It was in the first half of the 19th century that photography in the modern sense was born with the discovery of the technique of fitting a camera obscura with a metal plate that had been painted with a light-sensitive silver compound that automatically captured the pinhole image. In time, the metal plate became film, which then evolved from black-and-white to color film. In today's digital cameras, film has been replaced by light sensors that capture images by converting light into digital data.