Time Under the Sun
As the June 2017 solstice approaches, I have recovered some solargraph cans that had been hosted at these supportive sites, with the latest results below:
Each result merits time of its own under the sun, but for expediency I'm posting them together. The black and white images shown are the scanned images of the photographic paper at the end of the long exposures. Each black and white image has been flipped horizontally and color adjusted to yield the color image.
To open 2017 on a frigid day, Greg Rhodes secured the can to the steam whistle pipe. The day we took the can down in mid-June the weather was stifling. The solargraph image shows wiggles in the solar arcs, perhaps from minor damage to the can. Looking down and south from the rooftop you can discern the St. Joseph County Prison in the distance and hints of vast changes and construction immediately below at Building 84.
Kevin Drislane helped me to recover the can atop the baseball stadium. The winter photo below, however, shows Devon Hastings on the rooftop with the can looking east along the first base line. The sun's rising position shifts north and south between the solstices. Light poles on the stadium are obvious. The hand railing on which the can is mounted cuts off the descending sun, but the sun re-emerges on its other side.
Fortunately the original solargraph from the Joseph D. Oliver Mansion flagpole is an excellent image. This time, the inside of the can was wet and the soaked paper had smeared. If you make it a Rorschach inkblot test, whadya see?
The solargraph can under the light post had a modest ding in it, but it still yielded a good solargraph image of Copshaholm in profile. The north face of the mansion, having reflected less direct sunlight since the can was mounted in late February, appears in silhouette. Thanks go to Kristie Erickson, curator of Copshaholm, for supporting this effort.
A can inside on a ledge looking out the window had been secured with the pinhole low, yet the indoor can still grabbed a snippet of the horizon (not shown). Meanwhile, taped to the giant sign pole was a solargraph can that shows the billboard's bottom edge and metal pole in the upper right, and Rocco's Style Shop in the bottom left. Retail on Ironwood Drive stretches out to the south along the bottom
Looking Back
To me it seems that this crop of solargraph images has resulted in darker foreground subjects. When the sun spends only three months striking a north wall in the solstice-to-solstice season, north facing surfaces are dark. Compare the Church Dedication solargraph below with the original Copshaholm flagpole solargraph. The north wall of the church (even in the photograph) is in silhouette, while the west face of Copshaholm is better illuminated by the sun.
Additional 2017 sites to be addressed include:
Solar panel (photo)
Other solargraphs starting sometime in mid-2017:
See blog posts tagged "solargraph" for more stories about solargraphs out there.
