1. Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot was born in 1800, England, and died in 1877. An inventor and pioneer in the photography world, Talbot created photography and is the reason it is how it is today. He was a proto-photographer who experimented with ways of fixing the shadows. He wasn't very good at drawing, which caused him to start thinking about the camera obscurer and chemical processes. Talbot experimented with paper coated in silver salts and shoe-box sized camera, nicknamed mouse traps.

       At the same time that Talbot was trying to fix the shadows, he was rivalled by a French artist called Louis Daguerre. His process of fixing the shadows involved using a mirrored metal plate, known as “a mirror with a memory”. Daguerreotypes cause the ink to sit up in the surface, instead of sinking into the image like a photograph, which is why light is reflected back .

Unlike Henry Fox Talbot's method, it didn't allow an image to be reproduced as it didn't create any negatives, which is why Talbot's method was far more successful.