scanography pt. 1

have you ever thought to use a scanner as a camera? truthfully i hadn't until i stumbled upon "scanography" on the internet. basically it's using a scanner to take pictures of objects. usually scanners are used to scan images and pictures, etc. but then you're limited by the resolution of the image that your scanning. you don't get much more than a digital copy of your picture that's been degraded by being enlarged.

so what if you scan something that isn't limited by resolution - the closer you look the more detail you see. i tried this with some japanese maple leaves in the fall last year. the result is a high resolution image that i could print out at 40 inches wide.



this technique can also be used with 3d objects - check out dawn campbell's flower scans for some examples.

as for pt. 2 of this post... i'm hoping that in the near future i can try out another branch of scanography - using the scanner as an actual camera by placing a light tight box on the scanner with one of my large format lenses on the front of it. because of how the scanner captures images (with a moving bar) anything that is moving in the scene will be distorted depending on how it's moving.

take a look at this site for some examples (those are cars in the street on the bottom right).