During my Junior year in high school, I thought it would be fun to make a shed-sized camera obscura and make a solargraph with it. It wasn’t until a full year later that I had the 10 page grant proposal written up and submitted to the Needham Education Foundation (NEF). It was supposed to start December 21st and run through June 21st of 2010. Unfortunately, due to EVERYTHING going wrong, I didn’t start the exposure until June. The 10×6 foot paper negative was exposed to light through a tiny 2 millimeter hole continuously, day and night, for six months. This is the resulting image. Each of the sheets of paper you see are 11×14 inches. The original uncropped negative had about 50 sheets. The bands of light you see across the sky are actually the sun, each day. The dark streaks between them represent days where it was overcast and the sun wasn’t directly in view. I put a lot of time, effort and money into this project and I think it turned out spectacular considering all of the issues I had along the way. I hope you find my project interesting and I hope it will inspire at least one other person to try their own solargraphy experiment. Feel free to email me if you any questions, and thank you to the Needham Education Foundation for funding this!
