I taped a solarcan to the side of my parents’ house, looking out at the St Barnabas church tower. This was a very long-running exposure, over the course of several months. You can see the garden, and part of the neighbours’ house, I’m starting to get a sense of the field of view these things have.

I had imagined this scene with bright arcs of sunlight behind the church tower. There is one thing missing from this image: where are the dazzling rays of sunlight streaking across the sky? ☀️

I was so keen on getting a shot of the church, I didn’t check whether the sun actually passes through this section of the horizon from winter to summer.

It’s the second time I’ve made this mistake, a few months earlier I also set up a solarpuck positioned south towards Didcot B Power Station. That produced the same result, a fairly flat uninteresting image with no bright traces across it.

There’s another thing wrong with the picture of the church, but I’ll leave that as a puzzle for the reader to work out. 🧭

I’ve learned, and now set up a new solar puck in another location, positioned high up and correctly oriented to capture some pretty solar trails. I intend to leave that up for about three weeks.

In other news, I went to Ireland with Eileen for her birthday.¹ We at a lot of pizza, visited some places, and shot a lot of black and white film. Between the two of us we’ve now managed to develop and scan two rolls of film, with pretty decent looking results. 🖼️

I would like to make a CSS gallery component on this site, once support for scroll-marker-group lands in Firefox. While this isn’t (just) a photo blog, some posts here do have a lot of photos, and I need a better way to display them.