How I "discovered" that my scanner is a camera with a macro lens or, more accurately: how my obsession with scanography evolved...
It was over a decade ago that I'd bought my first affordable photo scanner. I wanted to paint a Georgia O'Keeffe style mural on my bedroom wall and what I needed was some sort of an enlarged tracing. Initially I'd taken snapshots of a potted vanda orchid bought at Home Depot. Then I scanned the snapshots thinking I could print out a pieced-together poster the size of my wall area. But my photography was pretty awful, I just couldn't capture a "painterly" looking picture of bright pastels. And....I really wasn't quite certain how to get a good scan- one I could blow-up to wall size. At the time I couldn't afford a digital camera and was using a hand-me-down PC with a pitiful six gig hard drive. (...though that seems like a lot of space when you aren't a photographer!) I was struggling with the snapshots when one of the orchids fell off the stem. Plop! Onto my desk. At first I was disappointed that manhandling the orchid was causing the blooms to drop early. Then it struck me like a lightning bolt- what would happen if I scanned the live orchid? To hell with those prints! I'd expected to get a blurry "representational" image- but that could be interesting. Then I managed to create a rather smushed grayish- purple vanda, but was intrigued enough to think- "I'll have to work with this some more when I have more time".
It had to be at least a year later... I was anxious to e-mail a holiday card to friends and relatives on the left coast. It was 2 or 3 days before Christmas and way too late to make cards and mail them. I happened to have a few leftover wreath greens and a poinsettia, so recalling my muddy orchid project awhile back, I arranged greens and a poinsettia on the scanner platen. The arrangement was too bulky (and sticky!) to put the lid down, so I just left the lid up and made my first scan. To my utter disbelief and astonishment the result this time was life-like! So sharply detailed that every vein and ripple in the leaves was magnified. And shockingly sharper than a macro lens! I couldn't quite believe my eyes: the depth-of-field seemed to be inches- how could this be?! Though the image was delivered rather murky and greenish- today I'd reject that result, but back then I was mesmerized.
A cheap scanner and an obsolete PC with a teeny-weeny hard drive
The scanner I was using was a cheap Visioneer model with virtually no value or color controls beyond pathetically crude. I had no knowledge of Photoshop back then- and only the most limited computer skills. Worse. No practical grasp of fundamental digital file management. For example I had no idea what resolution was all about. (This was to get me in big trouble eventually.)
By the latter 1990s I'd been frozen at an artistic crossroads. I'd spent a decade in the film industry, but that had come to an abrupt end. I had put down my still camera years before and had been more interested in experimental moving images. But when returning to the still image I was having trouble focusing- literally. All my snapshots came back out-of-focus. Always myopic, but correctable- suddenly it seemed I could only see clearly at the very end of my nose! With this glitch dampening my creativity I was rapidly running out of traditional mediums. Honestly, I was aching for a completely new medium to explore- but sadly, nothing had tickled my fancy and back then state-of-the-art digital cameras were beyond my meager artist's budget. I had bought that scanner thinking I'd be digitizing some travel snapshots I'd taken with toy cameras. Also I was just beginning to publish a web gallery. Of course having complete ignorance of resolution, scanning or web page design didn't help me any...
But after I took one look at that murky Christmas card image I was bewitched. I felt the distinct possibility of an obsession coming on. Being an avid flower gardener I had immediate visions of ambitious projects. I could hardly wait till February when I could begin planning and germinating my annuals. After that first season I knew I really had something I could make something out of, something marketable. Something with artistic integrity. Oh, if only I could edit the images and control the exposures like you can with a camera.
When given lemons- make lemonade! ....Dorothy Parker
Luckily, I started chatting online with some guys who were graphic artists. One fella told me what book and software to use. It was quite a challenge learning from scratch and progress was slow. Did I mention I'd been involved with a domestic partner of sorts and he and his business monopolized practically all of my creative time? Then, suddenly without warning I discovered he'd been flirting with someone from California at match.com. He was convinced she was a potential cash cow and poof! I was booted out of the picture when she stupidly moved from CA lock, stock and progeny into his house. So, I now had plenty of time, burning the boo-hoo midnight oil, teaching myself Photoshop. It only took me a year of working every night into the wee hours to get a professional handle on the craft. However a new hurdle arose...I really needed to replace my obsolete and lethargic computer system. Those 40 MB files rapidly ate up all the available space on that hard drive.
Then the unthinkable happened...after less than three weeks of cohabitational (sic) bliss my boyfriend returned. Yes, one morning at six am "Speedy", the cad, a.k.a. mister motormouth just showed up. Apparently he made the wrong choice (duh!) and Ms. California turned out to not be his bashayrt. (...besides "family" life put a serious crimp on his narcissism!) I realize any normal woman would've certainly booted his ass right out the back door- but I'm just not that normal. I agreed to give him another chance- but first he had to buy me a new computer and all the fixin's. Which he agreed was a good price....
An exciting emerging genre
So that's how I got to where I am today. I really had NO idea that there were other photo artists who were using scanners as a substitute camera to capture living flowers. I was especially rattled to discover that Ellen Hoverkamp lives only twenty minutes down I-95 from me. I'd chanced upon her work at a garden expo in my town years later. Doppleganger Ellen said that J. Seeley still lived in our state and that he'd been scanning too! (I had taken some high contrast workshops with him in New Haven during the early 1980s.) I was beginning to think our tiny state of Connecticut was a hotbed for the scanning addiction. Because you really have to focus all your creative energy on a craft especially when your "camera" is not designed to do what you are doing with it. Artistic minds think alike! I doubt even Ray Kurzweil, developer of the flatbed and forward thinking musician, inventor and artist- had forseen such a purpose for his text-reading machine (OCR) for the visually impared.
In an entirely different light...
After nearly a decade of studio scanning I discovered by accident at an outdoor demonstration that I can take my scanner outside into my garden! It happened just in time when I was starting to get a little bored and was hoping a new challenge would come along- soon. And it did! Who wants to be stuck inside on a beautiful summer day? Not I! A few years ago my editor at Ilex wanted to know if I could do scanning outside. I poo-pooed the idea thinking it was preposterous because the sun would over-expose the subject matter, for practical reasons a computer might get too hot or a scanner might get damaged- so it just didn't seem like it could be done. But I'd already bought an expensive scanner with a large transparency backlight. I found the results uninspiring- and limited to a tiny area. Why not use the sun- the cheapest, best backlighting available!
A murky greenish scan like this started it all.
One of my very first spring experiments.
A typically greenish Autumn Explosion made the following year.
Those three early pictures above look quite hopeless, but I managed to compensate for the scanner's crude results with skillful image editing that I more-or-less taught myself in a matter of months. It wasn't until 2003 that I could buy a professional quality scanner (thanks to the generosity of my cheatin' beau). In those first early years I did manage to make some lovely images dispite my obsolete, painfully slow PC and that Visioneer scanner.
I wanted to use only green specimens in this composition.
This result I liked better!
I grew a lot of annuals that first spring, and added more perennials.
