How Articles Can Help You Establish Authority and Demonstrate Expertise
Articles are a great way to engage your audience and educate them about a specific topic. They can also help you establish authority and demonstrate expertise in your field.
According to Wikipedia, a photograph is an image that is created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, such as photographic film or an electronic sensor. The first step in writing an article is choosing a topic that will grab readers’ attention.
Joseph Nicephore Niepce
Niepce was a French inventor who pioneered photography. He developed a process called heliography that produced the world’s oldest surviving photographic artifact: a pewter plate bearing an image of a 17th-century engraving.
Niepce grew up in a wealthy family and began studying for the priesthood but abandoned this career to focus on his scientific interests. He worked on a number of inventions, including a version of the internal combustion engine and a steam-powered boat.
In 1816 he first tried to capture permanent images with the camera obscura, using silver salts coated paper that would blacken in sunlight. This produced a rough image but it quickly faded. He then used a new compound that bleached rather than blackened when exposed to light and created the earliest surviving photographs. He later formed a partnership with Louis Daguerre and although his work was largely overshadowed by Daguerre’s, historians have since reclaimed Niepce as the founder of photography. The lunar crater Niepce is named after him.
Louis Daguerre
Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre (1787-1851) was a French artist and inventor known for inventing the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He was also a painter and theatrical scenery designer and invented the diorama theatre.
Daguerre’s process allowed the creation of highly detailed, one-of-a-kind images on a copper-plated surface. It was a huge leap in technology, as it provided the ability to preserve a moment or place in time.
The earliest daguerreotypes took between three to fifteen minutes to expose. However, as the process became more refined, exposure times decreased.
Daguerre’s invention of the daguerreotype caused a sensation in both the sciences and the arts. It is considered to be the first photo-mechanical process and the precursor to modern photography.
William Henry Fox Talbot
During his honeymoon on Lake Como, Italy, William Henry Fox Talbot had what was to be his “eureka moment”. Frustrated at his inability to draw well, he sat by the water with his wife Constance using a camera lucida, an optical drawing aid, when he thought “how charming it would be if it were possible for Nature, through the action of light upon material substances, to draw her own picture”.
He quickly began experiments with photogenic paper. He wrote of this new art: “The process is simple. The picture is formed in the paper by exposure to light, as if it had been drawn with pencil on it”.
He called these photographs calotypes. Unlike the photographic prints we are used to now, which look glossy and like they are stuck on canvas or paper, a calotype is matt with an image that appears as if it has been etched into the surface of the paper itself.
Ben Adhem
Abou Ben Adhem is woken from a deep dream of peace (which Hunt evokes with similes and metaphors like ‘like a lily in bloom’) to find that an angel is in his room, gilding the room and writing in a golden book. The angel tells him that it is recording the names of people who love God, and asks Ben Adhem if his name is written down.
When the angel says his isn’t there, Ben Adhem doesn’t grow worried or panicked. Instead, he asks the angel to record him as someone who loves his fellow men, because he knows that without loving one’s fellow humans, it is impossible to truly love God.
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a poet, essayist and critic, best known for his role in facilitating the work of other Romantic poets, including Keats and Shelly. He wrote many poems, but few have endured the test of time. ‘Abou Ben Adhem’, a narrative poem with elements of fable, is a beautiful and charming example of Hunt’s poetic style.
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