I’ve been into photography for a while. When I started it was stealing dad’s camera and getting yelled at not to take a photo cause each snap cost money. Film was expensive to buy, develop and print. When I was in high school and college I was into black and white photography and printing. Rolling film into canisters, then cutting it apart into strips to project and print onto paper is a long, involved and spendy process. While it is fun and allows for a wholly different creative process than digital photography, I’m not sad it’s gone.
The CCD chip is the heart of digital photography. CCD = Charge-Coupled Device and it’s basically photosensitive silicon. It was invented in 1069 at Bell Labs, though didn’t see widespread use until this century. I got my first digital camera in 2003, and now I let my son take my Sony Waterproof Digital Camera 
How a CCD Works
Here’s a video from Engineer Guy on YouTube explaining how a digital camera’s CCD works.
The video goes along with the book Eight Amazing Engineering Stories: Using the Elements to Create Extraordinary Technologies
Awesome!
-Mike
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