Dean Eppen Photography

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”            Jack London

To read Scanography, Part 1, click here

After experimenting with the techniques that I discussed in the previous post about scanography, I was curious as to just how close-up one can go when using a flatbed scanner as a camera or, in other words, how extreme can one go in the field of macro photography by practicing this craft.  I’ll share with you the results of some more of my experiments.

In the top two photos, I scanned a quarter and the navel of an orange.  In the two images below, I scanned a leaf of catnip.  In the first image below,  the full leaf was scanned and in the second, just a portion in order to get a better close-up.  All the pictures were optimized in the computer, as discussed in Part 1, and the output size in the scanner software was set so that the shorter dimension would yield a print size of approximately 8” without having to resize in Photoshop.  I thought the results on all these images were pleasing.

Now I was curious as to just how close-up I could go scanning progressively smaller areas and therefore increasing the output magnification in the scanner software.  The next series of images is of a chess piece queen.  The subject is about 3 1/4 inches high.  Progressively smaller areas were scanned until I was focused in on just the subject’s right eye.  All of these images are the raw scans – no computer optimization was done.  For the last two shots the scanner software was maxed out at a 3200% increase from the scanned area to the output size.  The area scanned in the last shot was only .17 x .17 inches.  It was very difficult at this point to manipulate the tiny box that would set the scanning perimeters.  A close up examination of the last shot will show that it is losing some sharpness and some digital artifacts are showing, but considering the miniscule area scanned and the degree of magnification, I think the results are still pretty good.  Again, these scans were made with an outdated, medium quality Epson Perfection 1200 Photo Scanner, so a top of the line scanner is not really necessary to get good results in the field of scanography.

The bottom line is that a scanner is a viable tool to do even fairly extreme macro photography, depending, of course, on the subject.  I will revisit scanography in a future post when I have new results to share.  If you have any questions on the techniques that I used, don’t hesitate to drop me an email.

 One final warning – scanography is addictive.  You may find yourself looking all over the house for subjects to scan.

 Okay…one final image.  For the picture below I scanned a small section of a sea urchin shell.

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