A Year Long Photo

On August 20th, 2023 I zip tied a solarcan pinhole camera to a street sign in our front yard.

solarcan zip tied to the street sign.

Pinhole in the solarcan lets just a tiny amount of light in.

On August 20th, 2024, I took the camera down and “developed” the picture that was captured. For one year a tiny amount of light was let into the camera, exposing the photographic paper inside. The result is an eerie, surreal, otherworldly image that shows the sun’s path across the sky throughout the year and the faint image of my house.

Photo as it looked out of the solarcan.

The photo after processing it.

For a processed, full resolution, but compressed, jpg version of the photo, click here. If you’d like the unprocessed photo as it came off the scanner you can click here to download the tif file (~40Mb). The image is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, so feel free to use it how you please, as long as you give attribution back to me (a link to this post for example) and share it under the same license.

You can find more details about the solarcan, and other images on their website. Briefly, the process is to place the solarcan where you’d like to capture an image. This is something that’s meant for long (to extreme) exposures, so you’ll want to leave it to capture for as long as your patience allows. Once you’ve run out of patience, you take the solarcan down, cover the pinhole and head to a room that is free from direct sunlight. Then you open the solarcan with a can opener and remove the photo. Using a scanner you scan the photo to digitize it for preservation and editing. Once you have the image on a computer or other device that you can do basic photo editing with, you invert the image (to create a positive as what’s on exposed on the photo paper is essentially a “negative”) and adjust white balance, color, tint, sharpness and whatever else to taste.

Some notes:

• I did not have the solarcan secured very well on the pole, it moved around and I had adjusted it several times through the year. This is why there is a double exposure effect on the image.
• Some sun paths may not be where they “should” be since the can moved a few times and was repositioned throughout the year.
• I believe that the streaks of light on the lower half of the image are light from our cars coming and going down the driveway througout the year. After talking with Sam, maker of the solarcan, I found out that car lights would not be bright enough. The lower reflections are very likely the sun reflecting off water, or windows.
• As some have pointed out on social media, you can make a pinhole camera like this easily and cheaply (cheaper than the solarcan sells for). That’s fine, and I like DIY as much as the next person, but there is something to be said for the convenience of the solarcan and supporting a small buisness.
• The image I showed on social media was not flipped horizontally in the right orientation.
• I own the “street sign” that I put the solarcan on.