Solargraphy
A DIY photo project involving beer cans, light-sensitive paper and patience. Lot’s of patience.
Project: “Within the Blast Radius”
After experimenting with solargraphy on and off over the course of 15 years, I’ve found myself applying my post-processing workflow in a novel way. “Within the Blast Radius” was inspired to a large degree by 1950’s and 60’s footage of nuclear explosions. And in editing, I fully leaned into that.
Probably fueled by the fact that the “Doomsday Clock” (yes that’s a real thing), is closer to midnight than it’s ever been. And that includes the height of the tension surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Cold War.
Aesthetically, I kind of discovered these looked like detonations of weapons of mass destruction by accident. While color grading scans of nine 6-month exposures on Ilford Multigrade RC photographic paper inside a couple of beer cans wrapped with black tape and tied to trees dotted around a park in the western Netherlands, I went “huh, that’s interesting. Let’s make a series out of that”.
Learn more about solargraphy and how to get started with this yourself:
Portfolio box: “Within the Blast Radius”
This collection of solargraphs is special to me. For that reason, I’ve created a limited edition portfolio box to commemorate these 10 six-month exposures. The one that does not quite fit the style of the ones above is “Buster Able”, named after a nuclear test that fizzled out:
Its story is fascinating. As we see a few orange streaks op in the left corner, it did spend time in the tree that I tie-wrapped a beer can to that all of these images were captured with. But this one got blown off by the wind and somehow ended face-up looking at the sky with trees in the corners and its previous home at the bottom. It’s the one solargraph with the most detail in the foreground because it wasn’t in a swaying pine for six months.
I’ve included this image to showcase all 10 of the surviving pinhole camera images from the first half of 2026, plus a gift comes with the first orders.
Other solargraphs or other editing techniques on the same source scans.
