Gone are days when photography was all analog. Today, digital photography has progressed such that you can be able to take photos from your scanner. Yes, you read that right. A flatbed scanner is ideally another ‘camera’ that you have in your home or office and can allow you to take beautiful photos that you can even frame. This is what is known as scenography or scanner photography.
While used for photography, flatbed scanners create images that are a bit different from those taken by a camera. It’s all in the name. The image or photo from a scanner is gotten when the scanner’s imaging head slowly builds up the image by scanning the object forward and backward below the glass plate.
Scanners allow you to experiment with different things in the process. As you know, scanners are usually used in the conversion of flat documents to digital images. They, therefore, don’t need a large depth of field. The part of the image that is sharp is what is placed on the glass plate of the scanner. This, however, makes it difficult to scan objects that are three-dimensional. While it’s difficult, it’s not impossible.
What makes the process really exciting when three-dimensional scanning objects in any given flatbed scanner is that the depth of filed is also limited. That means that the object’s image you will end up with after the scanning process will have a soft appeal.
What You Should Know About Scanner Photography
Scanner photography seems to lie somewhere in the middle between cinema and traditional still photography. In still photography, while there exists long exposure, any change on the subject can result in a blurred image that’s unintelligible. Cinema, on the other hand, is also built time that gives 24 images instead of one per second.
Scanners are now in between those two. With scanners, information is recorded over time sequentially into one single image. Whatever occurs in one-pixel row stays like that forever. And while any changes made to the object in a fraction of a second do get recorded, they don’t get recorded in place of the past image. It basically becomes new information.
As such, when scanning objects that are three-dimensional on a scanner, there are two important things that you should have in mind. One key thing is that you shouldn’t place any heavy objects on the glass plate of the scanner. Regardless of whether you are experimenting or are a pro in taking scanner photographs, you really wouldn’t want to break your scanner’s glass carelessly.
Secondly, for your images to come out looking great, ensure that the glass plate of your scanner is clean. If not, you will be forced to spend a huge amount of time in post-production trying to edit the dust spots. While there are scanners that allow you to scan using the 48-bit color and that result in 16-bit scans, they don’t allow you save your images as JPEG file but only as PSD or Tiff.
Using a 48-bit color ends up making the size of the file twice big hence it ends up taking so much space on the hard drive of your computer in comparison to a 24-bit color scanning. The only advantage is that you will have more room for postproduction alteration without the need to reduce the quality of the image.
Process of Scanner Photography
Scanners whether flatbed, handheld or sheet bed scanners, have almost similar parts. A flatbed scanner that is mostly used in scanner photography has various parts such as the Charge-coupled device (CCD), scan head, mirrors, glass plate, filters, lens, power supply, belt among others. Scanners are designed to analyze the object or document and then process it. The text and image capture, therefore, enable you to save the information on any file to your computer and thereafter edit the image, use it on the web or print it.
Having said that, while the process of taking photos using a scanner may look easy, at certain times it really isn’t. Scanners create their own light which eliminates the stress of having to stress about illumination. If you want to end up with images that are of great quality, it’s important that you apply a scanning resolution that utilizes the optics of the scanner instead of introducing a different kind of resolution. You can do this later in the post production when editing as you are more likely to get better results.
When it comes to the time you will take to scan any given object; it all depends on the resolution you scan with and the size of the scanning area. The higher the resolution and the larger the surface area, the longer the scanning process will be. Even though this can be annoying, it gives room for creativity. This is because, during the process, the object doesn’t move.
Instead, it is the head of the scanner that moves. You can make the process interesting by adding effects by moving the object during the scanning process. You can compress the object by moving it to the opposite direction of the scanning head or stretch it by moving the object in the same direction.
Scanning Three-Dimensional Objects
As mentioned earlier, while scanning three-dimensional objects is possible, it’s not a task to be treated lightly. When scanning three-dimensional objects, you need to know that the scanner lid will not close. What does this mean? When scanning your object, the light will sneak into the scanner which will result in ‘poor’ image quality. All is not lost as there are basically two solutions to this challenge.
The first option is to scan in the dark which can be done at night or then create a box that you can put over the object to ensure no light leaks into the scanner. If you opt to use a box, ensure that the inside of the box has a plain color. Although white or black works pretty well, aluminum foils have been known to provide an interesting effect.
In case you need to move an object that’s lying on the glass plate of the scanner, you can either use your hands or a blunt object such as a ruler or flat wooden object. Just make sure that the object you are using is something that won’t scratch and damage the surface of the glass.