C-20 // Things to do with a scanner

Hi folks! Sorry it's been a while since my last C-post. Busy busy busy. Not sure exactly what I've been busy with, but I seem to have spent an awful lot of energy lately on... something?

Anyway. I've got a bunch of photo restoration to do over the next few months and so I have finally got myself a decent scanner. I've struggled by with the crappy one in my multi-thingee for ages now, always getting frustrated with it's inability to actually scan things properly, so I finally spat the dummy, saw the light and got a dedicated one. It's a CanonScan 5600F, and it's wonderful!

I unpacked it tonight, and here's the first thing I scanned...

Yes – it's part of the packaging. It seemed appropriate, somehow, to christen the scanner with something printed in it's place of manufacture. This piece was carefully placed so as to highlight attention to the fact that the scanner mechanism is locked for transporting, and then needs to be unlocked before use. Of course, I was so excited about scanning something that – yep, you guessed it – I forgot to unlock it. Never mind. It politely told me that I was a moron, and to please try again after unlocking the scanner. :-)

Then I scanned...

...a piece of foam that was lying around my studio. This would make a fantastic texture for something if it was blurred and blended with something else. Maybe even a cool desktop?

One of the things that had never worked for me on my old scanner, but which I desperately wanted to do, was to be able to scan 3-D objects. One artist I very much admire is Maggie Taylor, who makes incredible surreal images by scanning objects and old photographs and manipulating them in Photoshop. My old scanner had such a horrible depth-of-field that all you would get was a few almost in focus points where the object touched the glass, and then a mess of grey blurry lines. So I tried scanning an object on the new scanner with baited breath...

Woo hoo!!!! Scanned with the lid up - hence the black background. Man – I just about did a somersault when I saw this image appear. Good colour, crisp detail, nice edges. That's more like it!