Making a Sunbeam

A recipe for a Silver Sunbeam – A glimpse at how I made a 21st century edition of the classic 19th century book of photographic techniques. John Towler’s 1864 “Silver Sunbeam” was a revolutionary book that shared recipes for making those very new and magical things called photographs.

The PDF of the 1864 edition

The silver sunbeam : a practical and theoretical text-book on sun drawing and photographic printing: comprehending all the wet and dry processes at present known, with collodion, albumen, gelatin, wax, resin and silver; as [sic] also heliographic engraving, photolithography, photozincography, celestial photography, photography in natural colors, tinting and coloring of photographs, printing in various colors, the carbon process, the card-picture, the vignette, and stereography.