Better than Scanning my Bum

Scanography. What a great portmanteau. Scan + photography. Scanners have turned out to be extremely useful photographic tools. You can scan pictures, and film, which is great. You can also scan objects and turn those scans into images. Most impressively, someone with actual technical knowledge can replace a large-format camera's film back with a scanner and use high-resolution large-format cameras with ultra-high-resolution scans. Image an image scanned at 4,800 dpi (my typical native scan size for a 35mm negative) that's 8X10 inches. That's 1,843,200,000 pixels (1.8 GIGApixels.) That, printed at 300 DPI, is a 13-foot-by-10-foot image. That's a 13-foot-by-10-foot high-resolution print. On screen or in typical printing, that 1.8 gigpixel image is more like 55 feet by 44 feet. So scanners are a powerful tool for digital imaging.

I, unfortunately, do not have the technical skill to convert a scanner into a film back. So I settled for using my Epson Perfection 1670 for scanography. I was still getting images that were 545 megapixels. In fact, those images were so large I couldn't open on my computer. After finding settings that my computer could handle -- 50-200 megapixel images -- I set about doing some scanography.

Scanography is simple. If you have a scanner, you can do it. Basically, it's a high-tech photogram. Set stuff on a flat plane and, expose. Instead of exposing paper and obtaining a two-tone result, you're scanning a flat plane with a very narrow depth of field.

For a future project, I hope to be able to convert a scanner into a digital back. First, though, I need a large-format camera.

Anyway, onto some scanography!


A multi-flower blossom made from a bouquet I got at Safeway for $5. Yeah, great colors and detail. Want to see what that flower looked like at a 100% scan?


Sure thing. For reference, the entire flower was about 1/30th this scan's size which means these scans are also hyper macro shots.


A bunch of great lenses.





Study of a single petal.