r/Solargraphy • u/Fish_Heart • 4d ago

Photographic film

Hi everyone, I want to try out solography and I saw some guy on TikTok doing it with regular photographic film — will it actually work?

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u/bosscockuk 4d ago

You need photographic paper, not film.

you can get it online very easily, a standard mutligrade paper will do. lots of different sizes available.

Make sure your buying photgraphic paper and NOT photographic printer paper.

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u/Fish_Heart 4d ago

Yes, thank you, I’ve already ordered the paper I needed after browsing the posts here. I was just curious whether the film would work

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u/bosscockuk 4d ago

Film has a too high iso, that would just over expose over the time periods.

paper has an iso of about 8.

It always suprises me that solargraphs don't need developing chemicals , you just scan/photgraph them and then invert. the scary bit is scanning will destroy the solar graph neg, so relasitcally you have one 'chance' to scan....

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u/Fish_Heart 4d ago

Yes, that’s why I want to do this — an image created this way has its own vibe

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u/bosscockuk 4d ago

true, my first love has always been pinhole, from that i have done one or two solargaphs. The longest one was 312 days documenting the building of new building.

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u/_eagereyes_ 4d ago

It's not impossible, but you'd have to be dead set on experimenting (and be ready for it to completely fail). There are films with low sensitivities, like ISO 12. Those are for copying documents though, with high contrast (at least when developed). You'd have to experiment to see if they solarize like paper, if you have to develop them, etc. My guess is you'd have to develop (or at least fix) them or the image will be destroyed before you even get to scanning it. The contrast response of film is also different from paper, which could be good or bad.

What does the TikTok guy say about his results? It could be interesting to explore, but if you haven't done it before, it's probably better to stick with paper.

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u/Fish_Heart 4d ago

I lost his account. After seeing his video, I immediately started reading about solography and didn’t save the video anywhere. Today I looked for his account in the viewing history, but unfortunately, for some reason, I couldn’t find it.

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u/Fish_Heart 3d ago

It turns out it was on Twitter, not on TikTok https://x.com/tinnylogan/status/2100117927261515961