Solarography, Summer/Autumn 2011

I found some coffee cans at work on the "Free to a good home" table. I had made some solargraphs using 3-pound coffee cans I had gotten from the same table. I had made some with Guinness cans and quart paint cans. I found the smaller, 12-ounce coffee cans just before the summer solstice and decided to add one more round to the solarography project.

I put the cans back on the chimney's spark arrester the evening of the summer solstice. They just barely fit under the cap of the arrester. They came down the evening after the winter solstice. So it includes the day before and the day after the winter solstice. The overlap of the sun's path probably isn't noticeable but it's there. Oops.

Here's the view from the chimney looking to the southeast.

The dark bits at the bottom corners are little magnets I used to hold the paper tight against the can.

Here's about the same view taken with my fisheye lens. The sun is in the tree on the right.

And, just for fun, here's the picture in black and white to compare with the black and white solargraph.

Here's the view from the chimney looking to the southwest.

And the fisheye lens's view.

And the black and white version.

My original proof-of-concept attempt at solarography used a tiny camera made out of a 35mm film canister. I made another camera with it and strapped it to the weather station's tripod. For such a tiny piece of paper it captured a rather detailed image. It's looking south. Too bad its hole was centered on the side of the canister so it didn't include the full wintertime path of the sun.

 The fisheye view from the weather station.

 In black and white.

I haven't loaded the cameras up again so don't expect these views again. I need to find other places to put cameras. The little, 35mm film canister could be put out in the wild with some chance of its being left alone. But I have only one. New ones come with rolls of film. Film? Who uses film? Is there anybody out there who kept such ancient artifacts on the off-chance that might someday be useful? Mom?

Another six months in the can

Another (a last?) set of solargraphs taken from my roof. The cans were put on the roof just after the Summer Solstice and I took them down today, a couple of days after the Winter Solstice. I couldn't do it earlier because of the rain. Besides, I get home after dark and I don't want to be scrambling around on the roof when it's dark.

I used two sheets of photo paper in a big coffee can. This time I tried something new to get the full height of the sun's progress by laying the cans on their sides. The pinholes were were aimed about 45 degrees above horizontal. This gave me a larger vertical range of the sun's travels but less horizontally than my other solargraphs.

The cans were attached to the spark screen on the chimney. One faced southeast and the other faced southwest. These pictures don't show as much detail of the roof as the earlier pictures taken with the coffee cans. I wonder why.

And none of the pictures I've taken show as much detail in the landscapes as in other solargraphs I've seen. I think the type of paper I'm using just isn't the best for this project.

Here are the pictures taken from June to December, 2010.

Looking southeast

Looking southwest

This set of pictures finally lets me see the same details in both the southeast and southwest pictures. During the gloomy part of October (where you see a wide band with few tracks of the sun) the same patterns of the sun peeking out of the clouds show up above the ash tree to the south. Next project: figuring out how to merge the two pictures to get the whole scene in one image. I don't think Photoshop has a lens correction filter for a pinhole camera especially for film that isn't flat.

The S-shaped tracks of the sun took me by surprise but that's one of the things that makes this interesting.

I think I'm finished with this phase of the project. I need to find places other than the roof to put cameras.

Time stands still

Here it is again, the solstice. That can only mean more solorgraphs.

Not much has changed from the other two times I tried this.

These first pictures are from the paint cans on the chimney. For my first try at solorgraphy, I had the cans attached to the chimney vertically and had the pinholes centered on the cans' sides. This let me see a lot of the foreground but it chopped off much of the sun's paths towards summer.  The second time, I put little blocks on the bottoms of the cans so they were pointed a bit higher in the sky. This made it so that there was nothing captured on the roof but got more of the sun's higher passes.

This time I pointed the cans straight ahead again but I moved the pinholes higher on the cans. This got more of the sun's paths than the first try and some of the foreground that was missing from my second attempt.

The tops of the sun's paths are still missing.

See the first post for the views taken with a normal camera.

Here's the view from the Guinness can I had on the weather station's tripod. I moved the pinhole higher on the can so it got all of the sun's travels across the sky. But the beer can doesn't seem to want to capture anything but the sun and a few trees' silhouettes.

I guess this picture shows our weather pretty well. We had a very warm January. This picture shows that we had a long period of sunny weather in the early part of the year (near the bottom of the sun's travels). Then it shows we had our normal May Gray and June Gloom as the sun climbs higher.

We're finishing up our June Gloom. Now we're heading into hot weather.

One day in March I found some 3-pound coffee cans at work. I thought that if a little quart paint can got more detail than a Guinness can, maybe a big coffee can could show even more detail.

It does.

But it doesn't manage to get much height.

I have 8 by 10 inch photo paper. That doesn't wrap very far around the inside of a coffee can. So I made 7 by 17 inch sheets by stapling two overlapped sheets together and trimming the height.

Here are my pictures from coffee cans that were strapped to the weather station's tripod below the Guinness can. In the bottom picture you can see the chimney where the paint cans were hung with care. These two pictures are looking in the same directions as the first two pictures above.  They're just 15-20 feet to the north of the chimney's pictures.

The black things on the bottom corners are little magnets I used to keep the paper in place.

I might try the coffee cans one more time. If I move the pinholes I suppose I can get a little more of the sun's paths. But I'd lose the stuff on the roof and not really get much more of the sun. But I have a lot of photo paper left so there's not a lot to lose. Unless I fall off the roof. 

Summer Solstice to Winter Solstice, 2009

Six months have passed since we saw my first stab at solarography.  I took down the cameras at sunset the evening before the summer solstice, reloaded them with paper and put them back up in time to start recording some solstice-to-solstice pictures.

I made two cameras out of Guinness beer cans and two out of quart paint cans. The beer cans weren't terribly successful. The paper in both of them curled up and stopped taking their pictures. At least they got some of the sun's progress recorded.

This first picture is from a beer can that was strapped to the old clothesline pole. It isn't the full six months because I looked at it some time into the exposure and noticed that the paper had shifted over the pinhole. So I took it down and put up a second one in its place.

Here is June 20 through sometime before August 2 from the clothesline pole.

Here is a shot from the clothesline pole from August 3 till the paper curled and blocked the pinhole.

Here is the view from the weather station on the roof. Its paper curled so it didn't record much of the sun's progress. I'm really confused about how it got some of the sun early in the exposure then conked out completely for a long time then kicked in every now and then some time later. This is a mysterious picture.

I was amazed at the amount of detail that was seen in the foreground of the spring-summer pictures but was disappointed that the top part of the sun's path was cut off. When I put the cameras back on the roof for these pictures, I put the pinholes higher on the cans so they would record higher in the sky. That worked but now I have none of the roof showing. Oh, well.

Here is the view from the paint can that is facing southeast. It kind of looks like June Gloom persisted into July by the fuzzy trails in the higher passes of the sun in the mornings (on the left) but my weather station seems to say that we were gloomy only until about July 1. Maybe it's just that the edges of the pictures just don't record all that well.

And here is the view from the paint can that is facing southwest. The tree on the left is the tree on the right in the above picture.

(In case you happened to notice, I got some of my pictures' names wrong. The got the beer cans mixed up so their names are swapped.)

Four months in the can

Can almost four months have already passed? Can it be the solstice? Can you remember when this all began? Can it, Chuckbert! Can we just get to the story?

Happy Summer Solstice, 2009!

Way back on February 28, I posted a little teaser where I showed pictures of some cans I put on the roof but didn't say what they were doing there. Izzy's guess about what was going on was pretty much correct. (Maybe it wasn't a guess. Maybe she knew but left it vague so not to spoil the surprise.)

The cans were pinhole cameras. Each had some Ilford photographic paper in it and a hole in its side. After I took the pictures of the cans I removed the tape covering their pinholes and just left them. Today I went up there, put some tape over their pinholes and brought them in to "process."

The processing is very simple. I just put the paper on my scanner's glass and scanned. No chemicals! No Costco 1-hour photo! Just scanning and tweaking with image editing software.

The whole point of this exercise was to watch the sun's progress through the months. We get to see the sun rise higher in the sky as the days go by. At least when there are no clouds. We get to see May Gray and June Gloom very well.

Here is the scene that the paint can strapped to south side of the chimney screen saw:
The sun was behind clouds where there are gaps in the white stripes.

I put the holes in the middles of the cans. That ended up getting a lot of the foreground but cut off the top of the sun's arcs. In this picture you can see the new solar powered attic fan and Solatube we had installed last year.

It's interesting how the sun shows through gaps between leaves of the ash tree even when it has fully leafed out. (The bottom trails of the sun go through the tree before it got all of its leaves.)

Here's a normal camera's view of that direction (though not nearly as wide angle):

This next picture is from the can on the east side of the chimney. The sun goes through an ash tree on the left and over another ash on the right. That's the same tree on the left side of the first picture above. You can see the Solatube on the roof of the garage.

This is the normal view showing the garage roof and the left hand ash tree from above.

This is the picture taken by the Guinness can strapped to the tripod of the weather station. This picture shows our May Gray and June Gloom pretty well. The sun's trails at the top of the arc got pretty sparse. We've had a very gloomy couple of months. The sun didn't make an appearance all day today.

This picture is from a Guinness can on an angled leg of the weather station's tripod. I set it up a few weeks after the others on the Spring Equinox. It's looking higher in the sky and a bit to the west of the other Guinness can. I'm not sure why there aren't many trails in the morning side of the picture. Maybe the paper inside the can wasn't right up against the can and shaded the sun.

This is the view from the tripod. That's the ash that the sun goes over.

I've put the paint cans and a Guinness can back up there. I am taking pictures from the Summer Solstice to the Winter Solstice. That's the longest exposure that you would want to take. You don't want to have a solstice in the middle of an exposure since you'd just get the sun retracing its path as it changes direction.

These new cameras have their pinholes higher so that they'll get more of the sky and less of the ground. The sky's the point of these pictures after all. But the foreground does make them more interesting. I wonder why the Guinness cans don't show any detail on the ground. Maybe they need bigger pinholes.

I made up four other Guinness cans. I'll have to figure out where to put them.

I learned about this technique from an Astronomy Picture of the Day. It's got links to sites that explain how you, too, can make solargraphs!