Photograph

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Earliest known surviving heliographic engraving in existence, made by Nicéphore Niépce in 1825 by the heliography process. The image is of a 17th century Flemish engraving showing a man leading a horse.

View from the Window at Le Gras (1826), Nicéphore Niépce. Generally considered the earliest surviving stabilized photograph of a scene from nature taken with a camera obscura.

A photograph (often shortened to photo) is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would see. The process and practice of creating photographs is called photography. The word "photograph" was coined in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek φῶς (phos), meaning "light", and γραφή (graphê), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light".^[1]

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