Capturing the light

At the heart of Capturing the Light lies a small scrap of paper, the size of a postage stamp. On it you can just make out a tiny, ghostly image: the world's first photographic negative.

The captivating book traces the true story of a solitary English scientist, Henry Fox Talbot, and his flamboyant French rival, the showman and entrepreneur Louis Daguerre. Both men invented methods of photography that would illuminate the 1830s and solve one of the world's oldest problems: how to capture an image, and keep it for ever.

Only one question remains: which man got there first?

Roger Watson is a world authority on the early history of photography. He is currently the Curator of the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey and an occasional lecturer at DeMontfort University in Leicester. Helen Rappaport is a historian with a specialism in the nineteenth century. She is the author of eight published books, including Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs and Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy.