The Solarcan Puck is a great little reusable solargraphy camera. It has a relatively wide aperture (f/90), so it can create a decent image in a single day. The limitation is that it has (for a camera of this type) a relatively narrow field of view - about 120 degrees. This means that if you have it mounted vertically, you are going to be able to record angles up to 60 degrees above the horizon. This is fine if you are above about 50 degrees latitude. At about 50 degrees, the sun will never be higher than about 60 degrees above the horizon. Why that value? Probably because of where Solarcan are based: in Scotland. What do the the rest of the world have to do then? You can restrict yourself to winter months - but that is not much fun. The other alternative is to angle your Puck upwards. But how far? In the worst case, on the Equator, the sun will be directly overhead at Solstice. This means that the Puck will have to be angled upwards at least 30 degrees - but this would mean tha
Back in October last year, I picked up some "Solarprint" paper from an educational supply house that was having a sale. For some weeks I thought about what to do with it, and eventually decided that the usual path of making contact prints or photograms with it was a bit too dull, and that I would build a camera and take photos with it. Now I am by no means the first person to do this - although the idea of producing cyanotype camera negatives is surprisingly recent. As far as I can tell, the first person to do it was photographer, John Beaver, in 1999 - over 150 years after the development of the chemistry ! More recently, blogger Nag on the Lake published a how-to for cardboard cameras in 2019. Meanwhile, Ray Christopher has been experimenting with using cyanotype paper as a medium-format negative. The cyanotype process chemistry is rather unusual in that is not particularly sensitive to visible light. It is most sensitive to UVA down to the visible spectrum. One of the s
Look up old pictures of the same angle from before they filled in Mount's Bay. Amazing.
ReplyDeleteThe Lost Perth group on facebook is a good source of photos like that, David Gerard. And, yes, they are.
ReplyDelete