A 4-month photo exposure

On the 4th March 2018 we put a Solarcan on the roof of a well-positioned house on the West Coast of Guernsey. The image above is the result of a 4-month exposure facing South to try and pick up the arc of the Sun throughout the day. This is like the ultimate time-lapse as this single frame clearly shows the movement across the sky as the Sun rises higher each day.

The Solarcan is a pinhole camera made from a drinks can with a sheet of photo paper inside. As soon as you pull off a small tab, it starts to record what it sees. The hole itself really is the size of a pin which means it benefits from/needs very long exposures and a lot of light. We’ve been known to run the odd experiment but this is definitely the slowest one to date.

We’ve already put the next can in place and we’re aiming to get the sun trails from the Summer Solstice to Winter Solstice. We hope this will give the widest possible range but we won’t know for sure until we get it down and can-opener it apart. You’ll need to wait a while to see the next result, though so if you’re interested, sign up for our newsletter to get notified.