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May 17, 2011

Garden Flowers

I was reading a blog the other day that mentioned you could scan flowers right on the glass of a scanning bed in lieu of photographing them.  (I'm sorry I can't find the blog article now to give proper credit!)  The guy's flower photos were really incredible and I wanted to try it myself.  These are from my first attempt.




















































Here are the simple instructions in case you care to try it yourself:

Put the scanner on the document setting.
Find a box that will fit over the glass and line the inside of it with some background paper.  (I used one of the really short soda boxes that holds 4 6-packs and some black paper board)
Put your flowers face down on the glass. (Some of the petals on my flowers wouldn't late flat so I sat small pencil erasers on the back of them to weight them down)
Put the box upside down over the flowers and hit scan.
No need to close the cover on the scanner- your box will provide the necessary background for the scanner to operate.

I don't actually like the black background, I simply followed the blogger's example, but I think they would be nice on a lighter background as well.

If you try this, I'd love it if you post a link to your photos so I can see them.

Cheers,
Andrea

2 comments:

  1. Wow! These are beautiful... will definitely be trying this later. Do you know how you or where you are going to use these photos?

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  2. Kati-

    Thanks! Yes- it seems to be a great technique for getting crisp details. I originally wanted to use this to document an alpine plant community that I'm doing research on in my 9-5 life but I can see now that it has a lot of other creative implications and I'm excited to find other uses for them once I perfect the method a little more. I would love to see what you come up with if you end up trying this- please post links to your photos (is that the right word for it?)!

    Andrea

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