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Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, has become Canada's best-known city. Once saddled with a reputation stodginess, it has been reborn and revitalized and now stands as one of North America's leaders at the arts, entertainment, and business.
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Photography, technique of producing permanent images on sensitized surfaces by means of the photochemical action of light or other forms of radiant energy.
In today's society, photography plays important roles as an information medium, as a tool in science and technology, and as an art form, and it is also a popular hobby. It is essential at every level of business and industry, being used in advertising, documentation, photojournalism, and many other ways. Scientific research, ranging from the study of outer space to the study of the world of subatomic particles, relies heavily on photography as a tool. In the 19th century, photography was the domain of a few professionals because it required large cameras and glass photographic plates. During the first decades of the 20th century, however, with the introduction of roll film and the box camera, it came within the reach of the public as a whole. Today the industry offers amateur and professional photographers a large variety of cameras and accessories.
Basic Technology
Light is the essential ingredient in photography. Nearly all forms of photography are based on the light-sensitive properties of silver-halide crystals, chemical compounds of silver and halogens (bromine, chlorine, or iodine). When photographic film, which consists of an emulsion (a thin layer of gelatin) and a base of transparent cellulose acetate or polyester, is exposed to light, silver-halide crystals suspended in the emulsion undergo chemical changes to form what is known as a latent image on the film. When the film is processed in a chemical agent called a developer, particles of metallic silver form in areas that were exposed to light. Intense exposure causes many particles to form, while weak exposure causes few to form. The image produced in this manner is called a negative because the tonal values of the subject photographed are reversed-that is, areas in the scene that were relatively dark appear light, and areas that were bright appear dark. The tonal values of the negative are reversed again in the photographic printing process or, when preparing color transparencies (slides), in a second development process.
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| Chicago,1 with a population of about three and a half million, is the second largest city in the United States(New York is the first). It is a centre of industry for the middle part of the country, the most important Great Lakes port,2 the largest city of Illinois and the seat of Cook-County.3
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| Stretching 1,244 km (773 mi) from east to west and 1,289 km (801 mi) from north to south, Texas, the Lone Star State, occupies almost 7.5 percent of the total U.S. land area--a region as large as all of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, andnois combi- ned. By 1994 Texas had grown to become the second most populous U.S. state, moving ahead of New York and following California. It derives its name from the Spanish and Indian words tejas and tec- has, meaning "friends" or "allies." Texas shows the influence of both the Indians and the Spa- nish, French, and other European explorers and missionaries. In 1820, Moses and Stephen F. Austin started the Anglo-American colo- nization that culminated in the organization of a provisional go- vern ment at San Felipe on Nov. 3, 1835, and in independence from Mexico on Mar. 2, 1836. After almost ten years as an independent republic, Texas became a U.S. state on Dec. 29, 1845. The modern economic development of Texas started in January 1901 with the eruption of an oil well drilled at Spindletop, near Beaumont. The rapid discovery of oil in other parts of the state led to a boom that has never really stopped. The economy of Tex as has become highly diversified, and its population has more than qu- intupled during the 20th century.
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| The eighteenth century was the great age of British painting. It was in this period that British art attained a distinct national character. In the seventeenth century, art in Britain had been dominated largely by the Flemish artist, Anthony van Dyck. In the early eighteenth century, although influenced by Continental movements, particularly by French rococo, British art began to develop nindependently. William Hogarth, born just before the turn of the century, was the first major aritst to reject foreign influence and establish a kind of art whose themes and subjects were thoroughly British. His penetrating, witty portrayal of the contemporary scene, his protest against social injustice and his attack on the vulgtarities of fashianable society make him one of the most original and significant of British artists.
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| In the sixteenth century Holbein came to England, bringing with him a much more highly developed pictorial tradition with a much fuller sense of plastic relief. Holbein himself was a supreme master of linear design; he could draw patterns for embroidery and jewellery as no one else, but he never entirely sacrificed the plastic feeling for form to that, and in his early work he modelled in full light and shade. Still, it was not difficult for him to adapt himself somewhat to the English fondness for flat linear pattern. Particularly in hes royal portraits, e.g. the portrait of Henry VIII, we find and insistence on the details of the embroidered patterns of the clothes and the jewellery, which is out of key with the careful modelling of hands and face.
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| When Henry VII abolished Papal authority in England in 1534 and ordered the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 he automatically brought to an end the tradition of religious art as it had been practised in the middle ages and in monastic centres.
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