What family goes on holiday today without a camera? Taking photos has become a part of life. It’s so easy! But have you ever stopped to think about photography? It may seem part of normal life to us, but cameras are a fairly modern invention! Photography has existed for less than 200 years. It all dates back to a process presented in 1839 by William Fox Talbot, the «father of photography». William Fox Talbot was not a professional photographer; he was just a very clever man — a genius, some people said. He was born in 1800 in the west of England. A very good pupil at school, he was sent by his parents to Cambridge University where he was a brilliant student. Universities were different in those days, and Fox Talbot studied a lot of different things: classics, foreign languages, Hebrew, botany, chemistry and mathematics were among them! And he did well in everything he studied. By the time he was 31, he had been elected as a member of the «Royal Society», that is the British academy of sciences. During the 1830's, he travelled a lot in Europe, visiting many historical sites. As he travelled, he drew lots of pictures, because he studied each site he visited. To help him draw quickly and accurately, he used a "camera obscura". As a scientist, Fox Talbot knew that some chemicals are sensitive to light. And like a few other of his contemporaries, he began to look for a way to use these light-sensitive chemicals to «fix» the image from his camera obscura. He decided to try impregnating paper with chemicals, so that the image could be automatically reproduced on the paper. In 1839, a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, announced that he had succeeded in fixing an image. His process was very complicated, using metal plates and a collection of chemicals including iodine, bromine, silver, sodium thiosulphate, and others too. His process was called the «daguerrotype». As soon as Daguerre made his announcement, Fox Talbot announced that he had already discovered a different process which worked. While Daguerre’s process produced a positive image on metal, Fox Talbot's produced a negative image on impregnated paper. He called it a «calotype». A positive image could be produced by making a «contact» image from the first negative. The calotype process was a bit simpler than the daguerrotype; and though both systems were used for several years, the latter finally disappeared, and the negative/positive process discovered by Fox Talbot became the international standard. Fox Talbot's original process was faster than the daguerrotype, but developing took a long time. Within forty years, other people had improved it, and the art of photography had become common throughout Europe and North America. The photos on this page were taken over 150 years ago, but some professionaél photographers are still using Fox-Talbot's black-and-white photography process today. For most of us however, photography in the twenty-first century is entirely different. Cigital photography, using a camera or a mobile phone, is entirely electronic. And unlike Fox-Talbot's process, it is instantaneous. We immediately see the photo we have taken... there's no need to wait a few days or a few weeks, in order to see the result. What would William Fox Talbot have said of today’s mobile phone cameras, high-resolution colour capacity, auto-focus, a zoom lens, and a built-in flash? WORDS: process: method, technique - date back to: come from- genius: very clever person - site: place - sensitive to: affected by - impregnate with: cause to absorb, fill with - which worked: which was successful - standard: norm, usuaal method. CAMERA OBSCURA This is a box with a small hole in it. There is a glass lens in the hole, so that everything in front of the box is projected as an image on the back end of the box. The back side of the box is made of glass, and if you put a piece of paper on the glass, you can quickly trace the image onto the paper.