Solarography

As a fun first test post, I’m going to share some solarography images I’ve taken. Solarography is the practice of taking very long exposure photographs to capture the sun’s path across the sky.

Generally, a pinhole camera is used, which has the advantages of: being very simple, having near-infinite depth of field, and letting in very little light - which is perfect for a very long exposure.

All of the pinhole solarography I’ve done uses black and white photopaper as the receiving medium. This makes a nice analog copy of the image, which I scan and invert. Occasionally I touch up contrast and brightness, but sometimes it comes out pretty nicely from the beginning. Prior to color inversion, the sun trails are burned in as dark colors and everything else typically has an inverted sepia-tone image of the stationary objects.

Here’s the first successful solargraph I took, using a beverage can with a pinhole punched into one side and loaded with photopaper. Every other “camera” from this batch got flooded with rain water and was a soggy mess that didn’t look interesting.

The strong blue-white lines across the top are the sun's trails over a few months. You can see a small building in the left half of the image, as well as the leaves and branches of trees that break up the sun's path. The cylindrical film surface receiving the light leads to a strange distortion that's somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

The scanner used for this image was a bit dusty, which is something I’ve paid better attention to in more recent scans.

Second Attempt at Solarography Last summer I built a batch of five different pinhole solarography cameras and had four of them survive about three months. The fifth was held in place by electrical tape, which got hot and slipped off before a strong image was taken. Waiting months to see the results of your work is a test in patience, but it’s part of the fun.

This image used a coffee can as the camera body, which was mounted horizontally to a fence looking at a tree. The camera or the photopaper inside seems to have slipped, causing a double exposure type of effect. The ribs of the coffee can also seem to have heat-damaged the photopaper in a very non-uniform way.

This camera was located adjacent to the previous one, but used a vertically oriented can. The difference in distortion, particularly in the sun trails and buildings, is quite obvious between the two. This camera leaked and had some water damage, but otherwise still came out really nicely. The different orientations of the fields of vision really help you visualize some of the impact of having that curved film plane.

Further experimenting with camera design, I built one out of a rectangular can of denatured alcohol that I had used for some garage work. The lack of distortion at the edges is quite fascinating, as is the strong vignetting effect caused by the increased distance from the pinhole to the further edges of the image.

This is the best solargraph I've taken so far, at least in my opinion. Unlike the other ones, I actually calculated the optimal pinhole size and did my best to deburr it with emory cloth after drilling. The crispness of the image is apparent, despite the slight ghosting effect that indicates that the photopaper or camera might have slipped a little bit early on.

What’s next?

I took the three cylindrical cameras from this summer and installed them facing the sun during the week of the winter solstice, in order to capture the minimum point of the sun’s path on the horizon. In a couple months, I’ll take them down and see how things look.

This summer, I will also make some new cameras and test out some new ideas. I’m trying to find slightly more scenic places I can leave a camera for several months without it being taken or moved.