Experiments in Non-traditional Scanning
This weekend I was messing around to see if I could get any usable results from scanning a negative in my regular flat-bed scanner. I never did quite get anything great with making a custom backlight as I couldn't turn off the reflective light on my scanner without taking it a part. However, I did come across this website where Mike Golembewski had made a custom camera using a flatbed scanner. It got me to thinking about what I could do with just simply moving around images on the scanner while it was in the process of scanning. I had several magazines laying around that I have been planning to use to make a collage and began to like the results of my tests.
I liked how you have a fixed amount of time to move the image around and its always a bit of a surprise at the end to see what comes out. I began to find ways where I had more control over the outcome of the image, especially when I could see through the paper to see what part of the image was currently being scanned. Here are some of the results I produced after playing around with the process for a few hours this weekend. The distortion is all done by hand with the scanner without photoshop.
