Hi all
I'm interested to do a solargraphy picture with a 4x5 pinhole camera for the first time.
I want to use a RC B&W negative paper. I'm not sure to record solar trails....maybe just the effect of sun on my house during 2 weeks or more.
I read that the scanner will vanish the image and the colors turn grey. How to preserve the image and colors right?
BTW if I put the paper in a selenium toner before the scan, is an interesting way to protect it from the light of the scanner?
Any tips or advise are welcome.
Norm
Hi Norm,
I am new to this forum and this is my very first post. I came here to ask a question about Solargraphy and I did a quick search on the topic to see what came up and I found your post. Were you able to get a sufficient answer to your question and have you succeeded at taking some solargraphs? In any case I think I can answer your question and will add my comments here for completeness.
First of all, for those who are unfamiliar with it, solargraphy is a process by which long duration (days, weeks, months...) exposures of the sun are taken with a pinhole camera (perhaps other types) which produce a record of the passage of the sun for the duration of the exposure. It's a VERY slow process, and generally the only things that are recorded are those that are very bright (like the sun, or reflections of the sun) and those that stay very still (like buildings, rocks). I don't claim any credit for the process. To give credit where credit is due, I first saw the technique used for the "Astro Photo of the Day" from January 15th, 2009. It was taken by a photographer named Justin Quinnell from Bristol, England, and I don't know if he discovered the process or not, but that's the first time I saw it. I have been working on solargraphs since then.
The process I use involves a pinhole camera, in my case a soda can, and a piece of photographic paper. I use Ilford MG IV, mainly because it was the first paper I was able to find locally in a camera store, but it turned out to be a fortuitous choice. I expose the film from a few days to up to 6 months, from solstice to solstice, after which the sun re-traverses its arcs through the sky, tending to (but not necessarily) obliterate the tracks it left on the film. After the exposure, there is a *visible* image on the paper, albeit dim and of low contrast some times, but visible. There is no chemical development required at all. At this point I scan the image, and the rest of the process is digital. I adjust brightness/contrast, the overall tone of the image, and saturation, but I do NOT colorize it. The color comes out of the process, remarkably. Remember, this is B&W film. Fortuitously, when the negative is taken, the sun tracks tend to be yellow, the sky tends to be blue, and the foreground subjects in silhouette tend to end up in the brown/green end of the palette.
Below is one of my earliest examples, an exposure of about 3 days, taken between snowstorms during the "Snowmageddon" winter of 2009-2010. Note the soft image of the snow, e.g. in front of the posts in the foreground. This is not because of the pinhole camera but due to the snow slowly melting over the course of the exposure. The technique tends to leave ghostly images. But there are also horizontal streaks across the frame. These are scanner artifacts due to non-linearities or defects in the CCD pixels. The extreme contrast adjustment needed to produce a decent image also brings out every defect of the scanner. You need a good scanner that can be calibrated before each scan. They don't need to be expensive. A basic modern Canon can do it. But the old scanner used for this photo was a 1995 vintage HP 6250 that used a VERY bright cold-cathode fluorescent lamp and a relatively insensitive CCD.
And yes, to partially answer your original question, the scanner DID wipe out the image. After the first scan, the image began to lose contrast. After the second scan, the entire paper began to get pink, and the image was visibly damaged. I put the paper away in a dark place and forgot about it.
One more detail which turns out to be relevant: This first attempt was made on Ilford MG IV RC glossy paper. That caused some internal reflections off the film in my camera, which resulted in additional tracks of the sun being recorded on the film. I removed those digitally, manually, to clean up the image. You can see hints of them to the left and right of the main arc.
Ok, so now is where things get weird. *Months* later, I looked in the box in which I had stored the original photo, and I pulled out what you see below. In this case, the image is NOT digitally enhanced in any way. Most importantly, I did NOT take the digital negative on it. Look carefully - it's a positive! The only thing not inverted is the main track of the sun (and to a lesser degree the reflections on either side). It's this sort of behavior that fascinates me, and has kept me playing with this technique for 10 years now... no, 12.
I do not know exactly what is going on here. I am not making any claims to be Ansel Adams, but this looks like some kind of "Solarization". More correctly, after reading Neblette ("Photography, It's materials and processes", 6th Ed. 1954) this may be the Sabatier effect. But most of the descriptions of solarization effects involve some form of chemical development in the steps of the process. But as mentioned, there is no chemical development here. All this occurs with light, and the film itself, in two steps (exposure and scanning).
The image below has been kept in the dark, unfixed, and has been stable for years. After my experiences with the cold-cathode scanner, I realized I needed something that gives me a second shot at capturing a good digital image. I switched to an LED-based scanner, one that can be calibrated before the scan to eliminate horizontal banding. The LED scanners use perhaps 100x less light than the cold-cathode scanners to collect an image. They do NOT alter the image, even after multiple exposures. This makes sense. The exposure of the original image is a very long exposure. There is so much light the image is actually "printed out" on the paper. My guess is that if you developed it, it would immediately turn entirely black (except for maybe some weird solarization effects?). So a small amount of exposure from the LED scanner is not going to affect the image. I normally handle the paper under red light, but I have had no adverse effects from short exposures to dim room light.
So, again, to answer the original question, a modern LED-based scanner will NOT erase the original solargaph image.
So, I hope I have answered your questions and you find this post interesting. And if there are any film experts who see this and have some Idea of what is going on with the image reversal, please let me know. I would very much like to learn more about the physics and chemistry of the process.
Thanks,
Dan
. I've gotten my exposures down to less than 15 minutes depending on the amount of sunlight.
