It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; its takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary" - David Baily.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. Most things in our life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photograph is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure. Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. It's more important to click with people than to click with shutter. A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled of the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
World Photography Day 2014, to be held on August 19 marks a special anniversary for photographers across the globe. It marks the 175th anniversary of the first permanent photographic process patented and freely released to the world on August 19, 1839.World Photo Day is about celebrating the ability to communicate through this powerful visual medium. Today, we can share memories across the globe in seconds. Photography is an invention that has revolutionized the way we see the world. We can visit places without leaving our home. We can share adventures with friends in another city and we can watch grandchildren grow up thousands of kilometers away.
World Photo Day originated from the invention of the Daguerreotype, a photographic process developed by Joseph Nic?phore Ni?pce and Louis Daguerre in 1837. On January 9, 1839, The French Academy of Sciences announced the daguerreotype process. A few months later, on August 19, 1839, the French government purchased the patent and announced the invention as a gift "Free to the World".
It should be noted that the Daguerreotype wasn't the first permanent photographic image. In 1826, Nic?phore Ni?pce captured the earliest known permanent photograph known as 'View from the Window at Le Gras' using a process called Heliography. August 19, 1839 was chosen as the date behind World Photo Day based on the following historical merits:
l The Daguerreotype was the first practical photographic process.
l The purchase and release of the patent by the French government.
In 2009, Korske Ara, a passionate young photographer from Australia launched the World Photo Day Project with the dream of uniting local and global communities in a worldwide celebration of photography.
The day wouldn't be the project it is today without the support of some persons such as  Richard O'Neill, Adam Leayr and Ian Oswald who were willing to see the potential of World Photo Day. Richard developed v1.0 of the World Photo Day Gallery which accepted over 270 photographs when it was launched on August 19, 2010. The start of a global celebration As good mates do, Adam put up with endless nights of "could we's" and "how about's" as we spent hours coding, brainstorming and eating pizza in his lounge room. A tradition that continues still today. Ian has helped configure and manage our infrastructure backend using really cool technologies including NGINX, Apache, MySQL and HAProxy. Every team needs a geek like this guy.
Now can we imagine a single day without having a photograph, especially those who are involved in different social networks like facebook? The answer is very simple and that is 'no'. Photography began influencing many scientists and artists from its inception. Scientists have used photography to record and study movements, such as Eadweard Muybridge's study of human and animal locomotion in 1887. Artists are equally interested to these aspects but they also try to explore avenues other than the photo-mechanical representation of reality, such as the pictorial movement. Photography is used by amateurs to preserve memories, to capture special moments, to tell stories, to send messages, and as a source of entertainment now a days.
I am going to end this article quoting Ansel Adams who is widely recognized as one of the greatest landscape photographers in the world. He says, "Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past"!r
Writer is student of American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB). He can be reached at [email protected]