Photos Taken At The Right Moment + History of photography

The notion that light can affect various substances - for instance the suntanning of skin or fading of textile - must have been around since very early times. Ideas of fixing the image seen in mirrors or other ways of creating images automatically may also have been in people's mind long before anything like photography was developed,However, there seem to be no historical records of any ideas even remotely resembling photography before 1725, despite early knowledge of light-sensitive materials and the camera obscura.