As everybody knows, a picture is worth a thousand words. That has been true throughout history, especially when we were rather short of words.  As cavemen we were etching primitive sketches in stone as a way to communicate.  We have also always used pictures as a way to capture an event, a story or a moment, to pass the experience on for future generations.  A way to show others things that are important to us. Technology has changed drastically over the years and we no longer have to venture into dark, damp caves to view somebody's family drawings engraved in a wall.  These days, if there's a magic moment you want to keep forever you turn to the trusted camera to capture a clean, realistic image. Believe it or not, these wonderful contraptions and the art of photography have probably been around a lot longer than you could have imagined. The word photography itself comes from ancient Greek. ‘Photo' means ‘light', and ‘graphos' roughly means ‘to write'. When the two are joined together we get "write with light" - a beautiful and poetic way to sum up photography. Cameras and photography have been around in their most basic and primitive form since at least the 16th century.  The first types of cameras actually projected what was in front of a wall-opening of a darkened room onto some type of surface and the whole room was transformed into a gigantic pinhole camera, with people able to view scenes that weren't in their direct line of sight.  A simple concept, compared to our experiences with TV and cell phones, but a significant feat in an era where people still believed the world was flat, and no one had electricity or even running water. Cameras are basically devices that are able to capture and record single or multiple pictures or moving images onto some kind of material which can be kept for a period of time. It's widely believed that the first ever image produced by a camera took place back in 1825 and took about eight hours in bright sunshine to finally expose it.  The instant gratification of Polaroids and digital cameras was a long way off. Over the next 15 years, technology progressed to the point where paper sheets coated in silver chloride could be used to create ‘negative' images, where dark areas appeared light on the paper and vice versa. However, these sheets of paper weren't able to produce positive prints. It was a man named George Eastman, who expanded on this process in the late 1800's, and founded the Kodak company.  It was his basic technology which became the basis for chemical film cameras.  These cameras created an image which was able to be reproduced into colored photographs. Cameras using traditional chemical film are rare now, largely replaced by digital models,  but without these humble beginnings, photography would never have developed to what it is today, and our homes, books, magazines and entertainment would be a lot less visually interesting.