This goes against the idea promulgated by positive-thinking gurus and charlatans: that life is supposed to be one uniform pile of sugary mush and cheery platitudes. I much prefer the attitude in "Macbeth"; I was recently rewatching the Polanski version on DVD. In one scene Macduff, a Scottish nobleman, learns that his wife and children have been murdered by the power-hungry Macbeth. The future king, Malcolm, tries to console Macduff, but not in a way approved by the pop psychology of our day:
Malcolm. Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break
Be comforted:
Let's make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.
Dispute it like a man.
Macduff. I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man.
Malcolm. Be this the whetstone of your sword: let grief
Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it.
OK, I'm done enraging it. The only strong emotion left is curiosity as to what caused the zoom lens to malfunction. Thus I prepped for the autopsy:
It seemed sacrilegious. If eyes are the windows of the soul, what about a camera lens? I felt like one of the early anatomists of the Renaissance, who paused just before dissecting a stolen corpse.
The operation did not proceed as planned. For one thing, after shooting my mouth off about how fragile digital cameras are, this thing was turning out to be tough. I'm sure the reader has experienced that sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach when, what started as a small well-defined project, starts growing, and growing...
With every step I seemed to be digging a bigger hole for myself. Worse yet, at some point I was going to step over the line and void the manufacturer's warranty.
I was delighted to find that the divine meniscus actually was glass, not purloined plastic. And yes, I did find a stripped plastic gear.
What were my chances of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again? Some of these screws and springs were made for a Swiss watchmaker of 200 years ago. Who knows if I had them all. It probably wasn't such a bright idea to work on a table made of expanded metal, above a gravel patio.
So, dear reader, we have finally made it to the inner temple of a modern camera's soul: the CCD sensor. The proof of its holiness is its sweet iridescence. Surely that is one of the prettiest words in the English language, taken from Iris, the goddess of the rainbow. Here Iris guards the forbidden temple, savagely swinging her many radial blades.
In the camera's case, its Soul is distinct from its Divine Spark, which is housed in the battery compartment. (Or is that the Infernal Spark?)
Here are multiple layers of poetic justice, the first being a rainbow of colors from a sensor, instead of to it. This is because it is patterned on the scale of a wavelength of light, and acts as a interference or diffraction grating.
It was created, patterned, by the very thing that it is made to sense: light. All microelectronics is microscopically patterned into transistors using photomasks and photopolymers. Some of the latter come from, you guessed it, Kodak. So you see, the chemists won after all.
When ultraviolet light is sent through the patterned photomask, with its microscopic clear spots and dark spots, the pattern is embedded as a latent image in the photopolymer that sits on top of the microelectronic chip.
Then it is developed, like traditional film in a darkroom. This leaves a miniature Colorado Plateau of photopolymer mesas and buttes on the surface. This is even called photolithography, rock-drawing with light. After dunking in acid, the surface etches faster where there was no protective photopolymer mesa, which in the geologic case would be called the caprock. It's like the differential erosion by water that created the topography of the Colorado Plateau.
The next step of the transistor structure is to deposit a thin layer of different material. This is analogous to the various sedimentary layers of the Colorado Plateau. Then this layer gets patterned, until the final chip is finished.
Finally the proud new owner of the digital camera, who probably spent more time choosing the color of the camera than in thinking about where a camera comes from or how it works, goes to the famous tourist spots in Utah and takes digital photos of the monuments and arches. She doesn't care how they got there either. But golly-wolly, they're so pretty and red.
