Answer to Question #42948 in Optics for sarada

Question

can a virtual image be photographed by a camera?

Answer 1

Yes. Any camera that's capable of photographing actual objects is also capable of photographing real and virtual images. If you stand in front of a mirror and take a photo, you'll get a photo of the virtual image.

What the camera does is to take the image and make a secondary image of it (an image of the image). This secondary image is a real image, because it has to be projected onto the film or chip inside the camera. The same thing happens in your eye. When you look at yourself in a mirror, your retina gets a real image of the virtual image.