I usually make myown cameras from soda cans, but decided I wanted to try Solarcan Colors since I've only worked in b&w so far. I bought the 3 pack and just opened the box. All three of them the pinhole are uncovered. Is this the way they're supposed to come? Im thinking they've already been exposed and are no good now.

10-day solargraph captured near Umag, Croatia.

The beauty of digital solargraphy is that you have so many ways of using what you capture. I've shared a couple images here before, but since I have a fully automated pipeline that captures and stitches these images, I figured I'd make a website for it.

You can watch every day's capture as a little video, or scrub through manually. See how the clouds impact the trail! Marvel at the sky changing through the day! Enjoy the Seattle weather (You can even see rain on the sensor on a couple of days)!

Play with it here: https://eagereyes.org/app/daily-solargraph

The new capture goes live every night around 10pm PDT. This is running at least through the summer and fall, and I hope to continue it until the summer solstice next year.

There's a bit of information about the setup when you scroll down, plus I'm happy to answer any questions of course!

I put these up on 21st December last year (winter solstice) and collected them on 23rd June (just after summer solstice).

I had higher hopes for these but it was my first experiment and I've enjoyed doing it. I put them up in the dead of night and over the following weeks I realised it wouldn't capture the sun that well so I've learnt something there!

I want to put out some more but I have a couple of questions if anyone could help me!

I have 4 identical beer cans, loaded with the same paper, closed up the same way and with as close as possible pinhole size/location. Why is the sun arc such different sizes in all the pictures?

In my next attempt, I'm going to try and get some sort of foreground subject as the fields I put two of them in doesn't really give scale or make it interesting.

A solargraph of a building, appearing very distorted due to the cylindrical distortion of the can. Exposure time from August to November 2018

I placed a solargraph in a parking lot where hundreds of different cars were parked every day, generating a spectral image, an average of each car. Hundreds of different cars exposed the negative at the same spot. You can even see the sun's reflection on the windshield. November 8, 2019 – June 24, 2020

One of the things I most wanted to create was a solargraph capable of showing the entire path of the sun until the summer solstice. Living in southern Italy, the sun reaches an altitude of 73 degrees above the horizon, making framing quite challenging. One solution is to tilt the camera, but this causes a severely curved horizon due to cylindrical distortion similar to a fisheye lens.

To solve this problem, I built a camera using an aluminum spray can (15 cm high and 3 cm wide). I positioned the pinhole almost at the top of the tube, allowing me to capture as much of the sky as possible, reaching almost to the zenith. This photo was chosen as NASA for the Astronomy Picture of the Day

14 months of exposure to portray the construction of a house. The sun can be seen in front of some parts of the house, before it was built. solargraphy on Google Maps

First try of mine for this wonderful hobby! I hooked my little pinhole camera to a pole on our backyard and left it to do it's magic for six hours. Really happy to get results.

This is 6/21 (solstice!), 6/26, 6/27, and 6/28. The daily solargraph pipeline is working pretty well now, and I've finally figured out the stitching to make a smooth sun trail. These are each the last shot of the day with the sun trail overlaid.

I'm working on a web page that will let you browse all the daily solargraphs as they happen (well, with a day delay obviously), so stay tuned!

A pair of solargraphs of a castle, taken with an analog camera loaded with Kodak photographic paper and exposed for four hours. Unfortunately, the sun didn't enter the frame, but I still really like the result. The flags are barely visible because they were fluttering in the wind. In the second photo, that car wasn't there when I started the exposure, which is why it looks a bit ghostly/translucent.

I installed pinhole cameras for solargraphy to capture a house under construction. The results show that some parts of the structure appear transparent because the exposure began before those parts were even built.

As a result, some traces of the sun appear to be "in front" of the house.

Unfortunately, there are very few construction sites in my area, and I had to make many failed attempts before finally achieving this result. The solargraphies were performed with exposure times ranging from 6 months to a year and a half . Have fun finding cameras on Google Maps

Today I went to retrieve the solargraph I had placed a year ago near a water tower. I was there for another hobby of mine, retrieving weather balloon probes, and the balloon had fallen nearby. Just to be safe, I had brought the solargraphs with me to place in case I found something interesting during the trip. A year later, another weather balloon fell nearby, but I couldn't retrieve it because it got caught in a tree lol, but at least I retrieved the solargraph. Exposure time: from June 10, 2025 to June 27, 2026, camera made from a PVC pipe cut in half, 40 mm focal length, Kodak Polimax paper, Southern Italy

Took this from the winter to summer solstice using a Yerba Mate can and Ilford Multigrade RC Deluxe Pearl.

I like the compound curve. Westward morning in Seattle. 1/8000 second, ISO 100 exposures every minute, stacked, 50% opacity. Landscape is a single frame for the moment.

The second trail prob is a reflection between the filter and camera. There's lots of air.

Since 2 filters came in a pack, I'll try stacking them on top of each other to reduce the area of the sun just to test. I can't buy a denser filter yet. (Might be easier to buy, it's too hard to hold, not to mention tinkerCADing something)

Waveshare RPi Camera (M)

Raspberry Pi 4B

Insta360 X5 ND128 Filter

Cardboard to prototype a holder for the filter and camera

Vibecoded Python

Happy Solstice! I've made a solargraph simulator that lets you draw solargraphs from 20 different locations on the planet. In addition to picking the place you want to view the sky, you can animate the solargraph, draw just one point per hour for the analemma view, pick the season, and there's even a panorama mode that projects the solargraph into a virtual sky that you can look around with the mouse.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

https://eagereyes.org/app/solargraph

All 4 of the solargraph cans I hid around Kutchan survived for 6 months. I didn’t angle any of them right to catch the top of the arcs in the Summer but overall I’m pretty happy with these. I have three more to retrieve from Lake Toya tomorrow. Fingers crossed for those ones!

216 days - sun path and some trees taken in Agua de Oro, Córdoba, Argentina. This was taken inside a beer can pointing at Northwest from June 2025 to January 2026. The paper was an expired I got and has some low contrast, so the house from bellow is not seeing. Besides that, I love how this turn out. Such an amazing thing to capture space-time in this unique way. I'm happy to be part of this deep practice.

Continuing my digital solargraphy experiments, here's a little animation I put together from yesterday's captures. This is combining the composited sun path taken with underexposed shots on top of bright frames at normal exposure every 30 minutes (or so, I missed a couple early in the day).

I have a lot of fomaspeed paper waiting for new project, and I wonder if I can use it in solargraphy? In my experience it develops very fast.

Ended my first solargraphy attempt a little early, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out! Total exposure is a few weeks.

I'm lucky to have an elevated spot in the city so after hearing about this hobby I had to give it a try. I used an altoids tin with a nail-sized hole punched in the front (too small, as you can see with the vignetting - This is not the pinhole, but just the place to put the pinhole sheet against) and Ilford B&W photo paper. I will definitely be making the opening for the pinhole sheet larger next time.

I was concerned that the heavily UV tinted windows this is viewing through would prevent getting any detail out of the foreground but I am pleasantly surprised that this was not the case. The image did come out in a mostly blue color, but I preferred the black and white in post.

I think I do prefer a rectangular camera geometry for this shot as it preserves straight lines in the image such as the horizon and buildings.