Comment by labcomputer

I wouldn't say it's basic at all. It's an excellent distillation of the physics of cameras.

My one minor nit-pick would be introducing the wave nature of light so early--to motivate Snell's law and total internal reflection, but without discussing diffraction until well later and only in passing.

Snell's law can be motivated from a purely classical particle-based model as:

1. Light travels slower through media other than vacuum (This is mentioned, but hand-waved as boundary conditions, which probably isn't meaningful to the intended audience). 2. Light takes the shortest (in time) path between two points. (Light... finds a way).

Either way, the audience might find the obvious "why" for the first point more satisfactorily addressed with a short sidebar on permittivity and permeability of materials (their electrical properties, effectively the capacitance and inductance "density").

That can also lead to an interesting discussion of why conductors are usually not optically transparent and insulators are.