Solargraphs: Summer solstice means six months wait is up!

… ok, six months and one day, to be pedantic, since I left my home-made pinhole cameras ‘in the wild’, as described here.

Of the five deployed, the two shown in the final photo of that previous blog had been removed, leaving only the bit of wood. A shame, but given they are next to a well-frequented part of the park, I guess some losses were inevitable. The other three were fine, leaving me two images from 35mm film-tubs and one ‘medium format’ black pepper-corn tub. The latter, despite my best attempts to seal it, always gets water inside, adding artistically to the image in some ways, and meaning some gentle dabbing at the paper with kitchen-towel and a few minutes in the airing cupboard to avoid marking the scanner-glass. But the 35mm film-tubs remain dry as a bone, with no additional sealing.

This is perhaps the best of the three solargraphs, with good detail showing in the landscape

Then, as previously described, the tweaking begins: Reversing the negative image, flipping it laterally and removing the blue cast are the main stages, and after that, it varies more, depending on how the individual image has turned out: Some tweaking of levels was done, and the medium-format image was put through my pseudo-HDR processing, as the original was a little dull, and it also seems to bring out the colours nicely.

Same location as the previous image, but angled slightly differently. Nice sun-trails but less landscape detail

As I was collecting the cameras, I also left a few more. This time, the intention is to leave them only one or two weeks, in order to show more detail in the surrounding landscape (and reduce the chance of them being removed). So, more to come shortly, I hope.

‘Medium format’ tub always gets water inside, but this adds a certain artistic quality