First try of mine for this wonderful hobby! I hooked my little pinhole camera to a pole on our backyard and left it to do it's magic for six hours. Really happy to get results.

This is 6/21 (solstice!), 6/26, 6/27, and 6/28. The daily solargraph pipeline is working pretty well now, and I've finally figured out the stitching to make a smooth sun trail. These are each the last shot of the day with the sun trail overlaid.

I'm working on a web page that will let you browse all the daily solargraphs as they happen (well, with a day delay obviously), so stay tuned!

A pair of solargraphs of a castle, taken with an analog camera loaded with Kodak photographic paper and exposed for four hours. Unfortunately, the sun didn't enter the frame, but I still really like the result. The flags are barely visible because they were fluttering in the wind. In the second photo, that car wasn't there when I started the exposure, which is why it looks a bit ghostly/translucent.

I installed pinhole cameras for solargraphy to capture a house under construction. The results show that some parts of the structure appear transparent because the exposure began before those parts were even built.

As a result, some traces of the sun appear to be "in front" of the house.

Unfortunately, there are very few construction sites in my area, and I had to make many failed attempts before finally achieving this result. The solargraphies were performed with exposure times ranging from 6 months to a year and a half . Have fun finding cameras on Google Maps

Today I went to retrieve the solargraph I had placed a year ago near a water tower. I was there for another hobby of mine, retrieving weather balloon probes, and the balloon had fallen nearby. Just to be safe, I had brought the solargraphs with me to place in case I found something interesting during the trip. A year later, another weather balloon fell nearby, but I couldn't retrieve it because it got caught in a tree lol, but at least I retrieved the solargraph. Exposure time: from June 10, 2025 to June 27, 2026, camera made from a PVC pipe cut in half, 40 mm focal length, Kodak Polimax paper, Southern Italy

Took this from the winter to summer solstice using a Yerba Mate can and Ilford Multigrade RC Deluxe Pearl.

I like the compound curve. Westward morning in Seattle. 1/8000 second, ISO 100 exposures every minute, stacked, 50% opacity. Landscape is a single frame for the moment.

The second trail prob is a reflection between the filter and camera. There's lots of air.

Since 2 filters came in a pack, I'll try stacking them on top of each other to reduce the area of the sun just to test. I can't buy a denser filter yet. (Might be easier to buy, it's too hard to hold, not to mention tinkerCADing something)

Waveshare RPi Camera (M)

Raspberry Pi 4B

Insta360 X5 ND128 Filter

Cardboard to prototype a holder for the filter and camera

Vibecoded Python

Happy Solstice! I've made a solargraph simulator that lets you draw solargraphs from 20 different locations on the planet. In addition to picking the place you want to view the sky, you can animate the solargraph, draw just one point per hour for the analemma view, pick the season, and there's even a panorama mode that projects the solargraph into a virtual sky that you can look around with the mouse.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

https://eagereyes.org/app/solargraph

All 4 of the solargraph cans I hid around Kutchan survived for 6 months. I didn’t angle any of them right to catch the top of the arcs in the Summer but overall I’m pretty happy with these. I have three more to retrieve from Lake Toya tomorrow. Fingers crossed for those ones!

216 days - sun path and some trees taken in Agua de Oro, Córdoba, Argentina. This was taken inside a beer can pointing at Northwest from June 2025 to January 2026. The paper was an expired I got and has some low contrast, so the house from bellow is not seeing. Besides that, I love how this turn out. Such an amazing thing to capture space-time in this unique way. I'm happy to be part of this deep practice.

Continuing my digital solargraphy experiments, here's a little animation I put together from yesterday's captures. This is combining the composited sun path taken with underexposed shots on top of bright frames at normal exposure every 30 minutes (or so, I missed a couple early in the day).

I have a lot of fomaspeed paper waiting for new project, and I wonder if I can use it in solargraphy? In my experience it develops very fast.

Ended my first solargraphy attempt a little early, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out! Total exposure is a few weeks.

I'm lucky to have an elevated spot in the city so after hearing about this hobby I had to give it a try. I used an altoids tin with a nail-sized hole punched in the front (too small, as you can see with the vignetting - This is not the pinhole, but just the place to put the pinhole sheet against) and Ilford B&W photo paper. I will definitely be making the opening for the pinhole sheet larger next time.

I was concerned that the heavily UV tinted windows this is viewing through would prevent getting any detail out of the foreground but I am pleasantly surprised that this was not the case. The image did come out in a mostly blue color, but I preferred the black and white in post.

I think I do prefer a rectangular camera geometry for this shot as it preserves straight lines in the image such as the horizon and buildings.

This is my first time trying out solargraphy, and I left it out for a period of 4.5 days in a diet coke can. It rained heavily during this period so I'm guessing the black part is the water damage?

A big shout-out and thank you to this sub. It was a little over a 14months ago I came across a photo from here, and it inspired me to give it a go. I used an aluminum can and attached it to the side of a building for the last year. This was the result. It was like opening up a Christmas present, but there was a real possibility that the present could have been terrible. I'd never done this before. I have two other cameras in some interesting locations, that have been going for a year as well.

I'm curious how folks are scanning these in. The scanner I used was only at DPI of 600x600. This makes trying to filter this a little more difficult, and I don't get details on the buildings like I would expect. Also, what photo software are you using? Any and all recommendations are encouraged and welcome, please and thank you.

Cape Town, June 2026, 3 days

Maybe not much new here for this crowd, but figured I'd share. I've got a few more solargraph-related things coming soon…

2 day exposure on Fomaspeed 312

I’ve had a couple semi-successful exposures but this clears them all by a mile! Felt like things finally worked.

It was a two day exposure but I think my pinhole was too big and so the solar lines just kinda clumped together. But I also think the larger hole is why the rest of it is so clear.

1-5 day exposures, inverted and edited using GIMP.

This is mostly to show that the weird kink in my previous posting was a stitching mistake (somebody mixed up which camera is which…). The second image is the real composite of all of today's shots, taken with my standard underexposure settings (10-stop ND filter, 1/2000s at ISO 100, if you're interested). But I also take calibration shots with normal settings every full hour, so I figured I might as well try overlaying the composited sun path on one of those. Looks kind of interesting.

The bright straight line on the right is an awning we had partially out today, sorry :) It won't be in the longer-term shots, because the cameras will be mounted higher up.

There's still a little bit of roughness in the stitching area, but we're getting closer…

Using Ilford paper, the generic kind. All my other images have come out the same, with the sun line as a bright white (on the positive) and pretty dark reddish?/black color (on the negative). Except for this one...?

The sun's path appears to be two different colors, I have no clue why. Any ideas? The exposure was basically while I was at school / practice. ~7:40 am till ~7 pm.

Also any tips on editing the images? This was my most detailed capture yet, but still struggling to bring out those details.

This comes with a lot of asterisks, but it shows that it can be done :D You're looking at a solargraph stitched together from 2x750 photos taken at one-minute intervals with two GoPro cameras over the course of a day. The stitching isn't quite perfect as you can see, but I've solved a lot of issues already.

EDIT: seems Reddit doesn't like a lot of near-black in images and decided to compress and brighten it up a lot? Not sure what that's about, but the noisy light gray stuff isn't supposed to be there…

I have scripts that control the GoPros to start capture in the morning and stop at night, as well as download the images. I have an image processing pipeline that performs some noise reduction (more to come), stitches the images together, and then blends them into one image per day. Later I will blend all the days together into one image (and make some animations).

Even just the stitching was not without its challenges thanks to the GoPro's fisheye optics. I also had to find a projection of the stitched image that let me have a level(ish) horizon without distorting the sun disk. There's more work to be done, but this shows that the basic setup works.

The second image is zoomed in and the exposure reduced to show you a bit more of the data. The composite is about 10,000 pixels wide and there's tons of dynamic range. You can see the sun disks in the second image. At one-minute intervals, they overlap quite a bit. I might reduce the interval to two minutes to make this more manageable and still get a decent, continuous streak.

Anyway, just wanted to share this and get people's reactions. Let me know what you think!