A Scanner Dorkly

So today, having been socked in with snow and sleet, I decided to do a little experimenting. I found this flatbed scanner for $5 at salvation army, but it doesn't have a tray for negatives. It has a little mask for 35mm ones, but it's resolution is so low that at that size, they never come out looking right.

I decide to see if it'll work to set a negative on the flatbed, leave the lid up, and backlight it with a floodlamp diffused through a piece of translucent plastic. Sho' nuff, it worked! Here's the result of some photos I took by retrofitting 120 film into an old 30's era Kodak Brownie camera:





The last one looks the way it did because I was guesstimating how many times to crank the little knob that takes up the exposed film, and I didn't quite make it. Fortunately, the accident produced a panoramic image of my mom's print shop. :-)


But then I notice that the scanner also picked up anything else around the film, like my hand and the cord to the lamp. So I knelt on my hands and knees and looked down into my scanner that's laying on the floor. I pressed scan and got this:



Dude! I just took a picture of myself with a flatbed scanner! Encouraged by this, I decided to go a little more surreal by placing random objects at arm's reach onto the scanner, and then moving my head in circles while scanning.



Earlier, Dark Haired Girl had emailed me being a total tease, given that there's no way I could leave the house to see her. So I decided to make some scans of... well... use your imagination. You don't get to see that one... it's for Dark Haired Girl's eyes only, unless you ask really politely. Seriously though, is that anything you'd honestly like to see?

I didn't think so.