The vertebrate retina, with its exquisitely regular organisation and its planar, near transparent structure offers a powerful playground for the detailed exploration of principles in sensory information processing in general. Moreover, detailed knowledge the anatomy of the mouse retina is paralleled by few other model systems in neuroscience today. Here, we present a systematic approach to add a physiological dimension to this description, by optically imaging light-evoked activity to visual stimuli that systematically survey key transformations during retinal signal decomposition, including contrast and frequency response functions and responses to Gaussian noise. By following such” elementary visual responses” at key sites within the retinal circuitry, including a clear link to anatomy, that we believe will prove instrumental in exploring a computational description of retinal signal decomposition as whole. We recorded from synapses, dendrites and somata of all excitatory neurons of the mouse cone-pathway. In addition, we recorded from a subset of inhibitory neurons. In the outer retina, we imaged (i) calcium responses from S-and M-cone photoreceptor pedicles in retinal slice of the HR2. 1: TN-XL mouse line (Wei et al. 2012, Baden, Schubert et al. 2013). In addition, we monitored (ii) calcium responses in both somata and individual varicosities of horizontal cells using GCaMP3 and GCaMP6 expressed in the Cx57cre/+ line (Ströh et al., 2013) using cross-breeding and AAV, respectively. In the inner retina, we recorded (iii) calcium responses in individual presynaptic terminals of bipolar cells (Baden et al. 2013) and (iv) dendritic tips of retinal …