lthough digital photography has come a long way in just a few years, it is still in its infancy, compared to the more than 150-year development of traditional photography. Photography comes from two Greek words: photos, for light, and graphos, for writing. People have been fascinated with this idea of writing with light for thousands of years, but the first photograph was taken by Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1827. Niepce used a bitumen-coated pewter plate to capture the shadowy image of rooftops near his window. Niepce called the image, which took eight hours to form, a heliograph, or drawing by the sunlight. In the 1840s, the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot created modern photography, by developing the negative/positive process. He took pictures using a wooden box camera. Talbot used paper coated with silver salts to produce a single image in the form of a negative. The negative could then be used to print many positives, or photographic prints. This process, although much refined, is still in use today. Using this process, Matthew Brady took arresting photographs of Abraham Lincoln and battlefields in the Civil War, even though he had to use a horse and closed buggy to carry his box cameras and his darkroom. Cameras continued to evolve, from enormous box cameras with slow lenses, to portable models with interchangeable lenses. A wide variety of lenses offered photographers portrait capability, the ability to stop motion (as in sports photography), telephoto capability, wide-angle photography, close-ups and more. Color photography took its first steps in the 1930s. By the 1960s, 35 millimeter film became the standard for most applications. The two most popular kinds of cameras were the rangefinder and the single-lens-reflex, or SLR which used a system of mirrors to allow photographers to look directly through the lens. Canon, the worldwide leader in SLR cameras, innovated many key photographic technologies. For instance, Canon developed the world's first microprocessor-controlled SLR (the AE-1), the Ultrasonic Motor (USM) for autofocus, Eye-Controlled Focus and built-in Image Stabilizer (IS) technology. However, while cameras had conquered the world, they were still too expensive for many people. During the 1980s, the point-and-shoot revolution, facilitated by lower manufacturing costs, put an affordable camera in every person's pocket. In that same decade, portability and affordability converged to offer the latest photography breakthrough - the disposable camera. As cameras became more popular, features became more user-friendly. For the general consumer, manufacturers offered features such as one-touch autofocus, helping take the guess work out of photography. As cameras evolved, so did film processing. Photographers in Niepce's day waited more than eight hours to develop one picture. In the 1980s, as photography became more and more popular and users grew impatient with the processing time, one hour photo developers sprang up everywhere. Today, more than 81 million photos are developed daily at the nation's 88,000 processing labs and stores. One of the most recent - and significant - developments has been the arrival of digital photography. Convenient and flexible, computer-compatible digital photography is not a replacement for traditional photography, rather it is an alternative fueled by the growing usage of computers in the home and workplace. Timeline