Activity . Take a large shining spoon. Try to view your face in its curved surface. Do you get the image?
Is it smaller or larger? Move the spoon slowly away from your face. Observe the image. How does it change?
Reverse the spoon and repeat the Activity. How does the image look like now? Compare the characteristics of the image on the two surfaces. The curved surface of a shining spoon could be considered as a curved mirror.
The most commonly used type of curved mirror is the spherical mirror. The reflecting surface of such mirrors can be considered to form a part of the surface of a sphere. Such mirrors, whose reflecting surfaces are spherical, are called spherical mirrors. We shall now study about spherical mirrors in some detail.