Photography

Photography is the art and science of making pictures with light. The word comes from two Greek words. "Photo" means light, and "graph" means to draw or write. So photography means "drawing with light." A photographer uses a camera to capture an image of something real, like a person, a place, or an event.

A camera works in a way that is a lot like the human eye. Light bounces off everything around us. When you point a camera at a scene, light passes through a small hole called the lens. The lens focuses the light onto a surface inside the camera. In old cameras, that surface was a piece of film coated with chemicals that changed when light hit them. In modern cameras and phones, the surface is a digital sensor that turns light into tiny dots of color called pixels.

The first photograph was taken in 1826 or 1827 by a French inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. His picture showed the view from a window at his country house. It took about eight hours of sunlight to make the image. Today a phone can take a photo in less than one-thousandth of a second.

For most of the 1800s and 1900s, photos were made on film. To see your pictures, you had to send the film to a lab. The lab used chemicals to develop it into prints on paper. You might wait a week to find out if the photo even turned out. Digital cameras changed all that in the 1990s. Now you can see a picture the moment you take it.

Photography is used for many different jobs. News photographers travel to record events around the world. Scientists use cameras on telescopes and microscopes to study things too far away or too small for human eyes. Doctors use special cameras to see inside the body. Police use photos as evidence. Families use photos to remember birthdays, trips, and the way people looked when they were young.

Photography is also a fine art. Photographers like Ansel Adams, who took famous pictures of national parks, and Dorothea Lange, who recorded the lives of poor families during the Great Depression, are studied in museums today. People still argue about whether photography is as much of an art as painting. Some say a photo just copies what is already there. Others say choosing what to photograph, and how, is a real creative act.

Today most people carry a camera with them every day, inside their phone.