Make A Thing A Day: SolarCam Images
SolarCans were: “Born from a love of photography, art & astronomy Solarcan is a unique camera designed to produce extreme time exposures that capture the Sun’s path across the sky.”
They’re a classic pinhole camera, packaged in a can, with incredibly slow photographic paper.
The company I work for is moving to its flashy new headquarters soon, in a new building. I've had permission to locate a number of SolarCans on the construction site over the last year.
I ran an initial batch of 5 cameras from Winter Solstice 2017 to Summer Solstice 2018 and a further 2 from Summer to Winter Solstice 2018.
Retrieving the paper from within the can, the image can be scanned. Giving these initial results:
Cam 1 appears blank
2 & 3 show a nice spread
4 obviously got knocked sometime in spring
5 might show something
Of the second 2 Cams, one disappeared and the final image shows another nice spread of “Sun”
With each of these images, I tinkered in GIMP. The basic process was to Invert the colours, auto equalise the colours and then touch up the image (cropping/rotating/removing some blemishes etc.)
And here's a gallery of the final images
Cam1 was a bust
Cam 2
Cam 3
Cam 4 (Heavily edited to remove “bump”)
Cam 5 (heavily Cropped)
Cam 6 (two versions, one as taken and one cropped and re-orientated)
