Salt Prints 10th October 2026

The earliest known photograph of Stirling was made by the salt printing process and it was the first step towards establishing photography for all. The salted paper print process is a 19th-century photographic technique (invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s) that creates matte, reddish-brown, or sepia-toned images. Fox Talbot's Sun images of Scotland is an incredibly important book of salt prints with some of the earliest photographs ever taken in Scotland. Other early photographers found their way with this new process and now you can too ! It involves coating high-quality cotton paper with a salt solution (like sodium chloride), sensitizing it with silver nitrate in the dark to create silver chloride, and exposing it to UV light (sunlight) through a negative.