The View from the Sky

As the autumn leaves tumble down from the trees

Fading, falling in designs to be

Bearing the colors and patterns and beauty

Of the changing world all around me

These leaves they flow and flutter all around

Falling and gracing the cold hard ground

Making and breaking patterns of its course

All to re-create the sight that had once been

Looking down from the sky

Or the upward view from below

One way or the other

The world has endless angles to show

The Calotype Creation

William Henry Fox Tabot's 1835 photo from Lacock Abbey.

Modern film photography has taken the world years to create.  The basic principles of the camera and its recording medium, film, has transformed over the years into the form that we know and love today.
Dating back to the 5th century BC, the basics of the camera were discovered, and from there the idea and reality of still images grew.
By William Henry Fox Talbot’s time, the mid 1800s, the process was at a crucial turning point.  Through Talbot’s determination (and mounds of British pounds), he created the Calotype photographic process - the first process that was negative/positive, and could make multiple prints.
The problem with the previous photographic process, the camera obscura was the fact that the exposure required 8 hours of light and the pictures faded away.

“I then thought of trying again a method which I had tried many years before,” Talbot said,  “This method was to take  Camera Obscura and to throw the image of the objects on a piece of paper in its focus-fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away...”

This roadblock only motivated the multi-talented Talbot to usedhis knowledge in a multitude of fields to create a process that changed the course of photographic history.
For his discovery of the Calotype process, Talbot deserves the respect and homage that he did not receive during his lifetime.
Like myself, Talbot said “After various fruitless attempts I laid aside the instrument and came to the conclusion that [the pencil’s] use required a previous knowledge of drawing which unfortunately did not possess.”
One of Talbot’s main motivations to create the new photographic process was to capture images that he could not document with pencil and paper.
As a botanist, Talbot was required to observe and document plant specimens, but due to his lack of artistic skills with drawing, he was incapable of sketching.
His determination to create a lasting photographic process is what makes him stand out among the multitudes of photographers in history.