Recently, in another experiment, I attempted to delve into the world of solargraphy. This typically involves exposing a light sensitve piece of photographic paper for weeks or months at a time utilizing a pinhole camera. With the emergence of digital photography, light sensitive film and paper aren’t used too much anymore as it involves chemical processing in a darkroom (which, by the way, I loved doing back in the day). However with this process the paper is scanned rather than being developed and it yields some interesting results. The long exposure shows the path of the sun across the sky and some abstract, sometimes eerie results in the foreground. Many practitioners of this craft will make exposures of 6 months to get the full paths of the sun and some have even gone for a year or more. There are some really nice examples in the links below.

https://www.newscientist.com/gallery/mg20026761900-solargraphs-show-half-a-year-of-sun

https://www.heatherpalecek.com/solargraphy

Typically the camera is made from a can with a small needle hole poked into it. The tall beer cans work the best for a 5×7 sheet of photographic paper. Detailed instructions for making the camera, and how to scan and process the resulting image, can be found on the informative and entertaining YouTube video by Justin Quinnell below.

Following the instructions in the video, this is the camera that I constructed using a Heineken beer can.

The first step in the procedure, which was emptying the can of its original contents, was a particularly satisfying part of the process.

Anyway, I made two of these and found some spots in the woods that I thought looked interesting. To get the sun trails the camera needs to be facing south if you’re in the northern hempishere and vice versa if you’re in the southern. It can also be pointed east or west if you just want to leave it for a day and get a single sun streak. I zip tied them to trees and since it was a trial run I only left them for three weeks pointing south. The results were somewhat interesting but I can see it will take more experience and experimenting to get better results. When things warm up a little I hope to try again. It’s below zero today here in Minnesota so it’s a good day to stay home.

One of the challenges to finding a good location to place these is that the angle of view is very wide – nearly 180 degrees. So things that are even fairly close tend to be very small in the image. In the above picture I was trying to capture a bridge which you can see if you look closely but my placement was too far away. If you look at the sun trails, the places where there are breaks or where there are different shades is when the sun was partially or totally covered by clouds.

I’m looking forward to trying more of these in the future. Check back again to see what I come up with.