In English we say "take a photograph" whereas in some other languages one would say "make a photograph".
The French say "take" even though they "make" far more often than we do in English, and Germans say "make". The Spanish are also in the "take" camp, so it seems to be related to romance/germanic distinction, further afield, Russians say "make" (I think).
Some say that cameras steal your soul. Saying that a camera removes (one Spanish verb is literally "remove") rather than constructs the photograph seems to betray a very different philosophy and attitude to photography as a creative process.
So, how did we end up using "take" rather than "make"?
Best Answer
Merriam-Webster Online gathers several related senses of take:
The common meaning here is to record something by procedure or writing instrument.
I hadn't previously seen the uses take a painting or take a drawing, so I consulted Google books and found that taking a drawing was common in the 1800s, during the rise of photography. This sense of take appears to have arisen in the late 1700s; note this example from The New-York Magazine or, Literary Repository (1792):
While making a drawing was always more common than taking one, I suspect that the latter usage took hold for photographs because the process of capturing (taking) a photograph is distinct from printing (making) it, and the taking happens when you open the shutter.