"Turn your head a bit to the right, Pauly," Billy said.
Pauly did as he was told.
"That’s good! Now lift your chin a bit."
Billy was getting a picture of Pauly for The Writer’s next book, because he would be in it. "Now, don’t blink!" he said.
"Ha-ha!" Pauly replied, as he lifted his chin slightly. (He thought that was funny, because his eyes don't close. He knows what a blink is, even if he can't do it!)
Billy took several shots from different angles. He planned to pick the best one from all of the photos he was taking.
"Now," Billy told the younger doll, "I'll pick the best one and crop it so it will be square. That means I’ll cut off some extra from two sides so all four sides are the same size and put your face in the center."
Billy wouldn’t need scissors. He could do it all on a tablet or the laptop.
"Why does the photo have to be square?" Pauly asked.
"I’ll show you," Billy replied. He had learned that just telling someone something they don’t know isn’t as good as showing them while you’re telling them. He took Pauly into the guest room, where the kids' books were. He got out The Doll’s Storybook's latest book.
The two boys climbed up onto the guest bed, and Billy opened the book. "Here are the photos of all the dolls who are in the book," Billy said, turning to the last page in the book that had photos..
"Each one is a square," he explained. "We want to add your photo, so it should be like the others, and squares fit together nicely on the page."
Pauly looked at the page and tried to imagine his photo there.
He could see how it would be important for his photo to be like the others. It was sort of like at the end of a play, when each actor comes out at the end and takes a bow. Someone had told him that was a curtain call.
They sometimes had plays at school, and that’s what they did at the end. Everyone clapped their hands for each doll. He liked to think about real children (and maybe some doll collectors, who also like the stories) clapping their hands for him at the end of the book. He would try to be good enough for them to do that.
Then Pauly had a thought. "How does my picture get into the camera?" He asked Billy.
"I wondered that, too," Billy said, "so I asked Mandy."
"She suggested we look it up together, so we did."
Billy thought it was fun learning something with Mandy instead of just from her. They were learning together. Mandy knows how to look things up. She usually knows when something she reads online isn't right, and how to check to make sure something is true.
"We found out," Billy said, "that a camera is a box that’s made so no light can get in except when the photo is taken."
"It’s the light that lets us get a photo," Billy explained. "You can’t go into a closet and close the door so it’s dark and then take a photo and expect it to show anything. Not without a light." (Billy knew, because he had tried it out.)
"You would need to set your camera so a flash would go off," Billy said. "A flash is a light that the camera makes just to light up what you’re taking a picture of."
"We don’t need to do that, though," he told Pauly, "unless there isn’t enough light."
"My camera," Billy said proudly, because he was so pleased to have a real camera of his own, "my camera can change how it takes the photo depending on how much light there is. Most cameras these days, including those on a phone, can do that."
"So how does the light get into the camera to make a photo?" Pauly asked.
"I was getting to that," Billy said patiently. "You see, there’s a hole on one side of the camera, the side facing what you want to photograph." Billy tried to show Pauly the picture he and Mandy had seen when they were learning about cameras. (He had to show Pauly with his mind, which took a lot of concentration.) It showed a camera taking a photo of a dog. The light shining on the dog went through the lens of the camera, which is like a little window. (It does that when the shutter is opened. A shutter is like a door that closes over a window, but this one is tiny, because it's inside the camera.) In the drawing, the light reached the sensor (SIN-ser) and left the image of the dog.
"When the shutter is closed, the light can’t get in until you take the photo," Billy told the younger doll. "When you take the picture, you press this button down. The shutter opens and lets the light in."
Pauly had seen Billy push the button down.
"The light," Billy continued, "reaches the back of the camera, where the sensor records it. Then," Billy said, "I can look at the photo on the display, if I want. That's what we call this little screen on the back of the camera."
"If I like what I see," he explained, "I don’t have to take more, but I like to move around and take several photos from different places. When I look at the photos on the laptop, I can tell better which one I like best. Sometimes I make mistakes and don't know it until I look at it on the computer. It’s a surprise."
"Now let's go to the laptop," Billy suggested. "We can use it to pick out which photo to use."
It took a few minutes for the boys to make their way down the stairs. They helped each other, so it would go faster.
"We don’t want to use this one," Billy said, when they had the photos on the laptop. He showed Pauly. "I didn’t hold the camera steady enough, so the photo is sort of blurred. That's what I meant when I said sometimes it's a surprise when a photo isn't any good."
"Let’s not pick the blurry one for the book," Pauly suggested when he saw the photo Billy was talking about. He knew what blurry meant, and it made his eyes hurt. Billy agreed that the blurry photo wasn't good enough for a book. He wouldn't even bother to crop it and make it square.
They would have to choose the photo that showed how handsome Pauly was, and it would have to be very clear, so readers could recognize him when they saw him in the book. They looked at each photo and talked about what they liked about it and what they didn't.
"I just thought of another question," Pauly told Billy after they had decided which photo to use, and Billy had cropped the photo so Pauly's head was about the same size as Pippa's was in her photo. "How does the photo get from the camera to the laptop?" he asked. "It seems like magic!"
"Well," Billy said, "some cameras have to be connected to the computer with a cord, but while we were making our way down the stairs, my camera was sending the photos to something called 'the Cloud.' The computer can take it from the Cloud. If I'm right here when I take the photo, I might have to wait a few minutes for it to show up, but soon it will be right here in my photos."
"Does an angel on the cloud get it and put it into the computer?" Pauly wanted to know.
Billy wanted to laugh, but he remembered when he hadn't known things like that, so he didn't. "No," he replied. "It isn't that kind of cloud. It's like how we get our internet and television. If our wifi goes out, it won't work."
Pauly was glad an angel wasn't looking at the blurry photo of him. They might think they needed glasses!
Pauly couldn't imagine an angel with glasses!
Information on cameras: https://kids.kiddle.co/Cameras
Photo of curtain call: Onstage Blog
Diagram of camera: Encyclopedia Brittanica
Photo of flash: Wired
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
Billy: Götz Happy Kidz Lily at London
"The Doll's Storybook" is not affiliated with Gotz Dolls USA Inc. or Götz Puppenmanufaktur International GmbH.
Watch for the next story each Friday afternoon at 1:00 PM Pacific Time.
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