This could be regarded as a very early example of the snapshot photograph, since it is a father’s photograph of his son fly-fishing. The son is assisted by a gillie (a Scottish term for an attendant in the sport). It is true that photography made possible new kinds of intimate and casual records of family life. However, this photograph would have been very deliberately staged and posed, because the Daguerreotype process was highly complex to use, especially in the open air. Daguerrotype was the first commercially available form of photography, introduced in 1839. Each photograph was a one-off, appearing on a silvered copper plate.

In fact, Horatio Ross was perhaps the only photographer to use the process to photograph fly-fishing. He himself was one of the greatest sportsmen of his time. When he took up photography as one of the earliest British amateurs he naturally sought to illustrate his favourite pastimes. This example is enhanced by a lucky accident. The relative brightness of the sky, compared to the rest of the scene, has caused ‘solarisation’ - a reversal of white into blue. It looks as if the sky that day was blue and the Daguerreotype medium (which was black and white only) had been able to record it.