I bought myself a Solarcan camera – I honestly can’t remember where I’d heard about them, most likely Twitter. It’s a really simple pinhole camera in a drinking can, designed to capture long exposures of the sun. So I installed one on our house, looking south, on the summer solstice 2022. I took it down exactly 6 months later with bubbling anticipation…
It really is a camera inside a drinks can container, complete with ring pull and everything. You get a really nice set of instructions and advice, plus a handy kit for installing i.e. some cable ties, but I unfortunately didn’t have a convenient drainpipe or similar to which I could secure the can. So 10 mins of hanging-out-of-a-second-story-window-with-a-drill later, my camera was up and running.
It was then a question of waiting a full half-year until the winter solstice before I’d be able to know if it was orientated correctly, if the wind had caused too much movement, if the camera was capturing anything at all…
The 21st December arrived, and I eagerly but gingerly cut the camera free and then set about hacking into the drinks can, which was quite an effort as my can opener didn’t fit around the rim. Once inside, you simply remove the photographic paper in a darkened room, and then use a scanner to get a digital image.
This negative can then be inverted and processed in any imaging software to tweak colours etc. I’m pretty happy with the result!
The daily tracks of the sun can be seen, starting low in the east, climbing to the noon peak and falling away into the west. Cloudy days (of which we get many round here) create the dark gaps for a fantastic effect. This is pretty much the raw inverted image, aside from a small enhancement of the yellows. My scanner isn’t great at the faint tones on the negative and so it’s a little pixelated.
But overall, it’s been a hugely fun experiment and the end result will take pride of place on the wall. I highly recommend buying yourself a Solarcan, and they also make a really unique present.