| National Council for the Conservation
of Plants and Gardens Garden Plant Conservation Gloucestershire Group, Reg. Charity No. 1065087 |
 Flower pictures like those on this page were produced on a normal A4 flatbed scanner without the use of a camera. How? 1. Clean the scanner platen thoroughly and lay your flower sample on it face down. Prop the front of the lid open with an empty cassette case or something similar, so that it doesn't actually touch the specimen.
2. Set the scanning resolution to the LOWEST setting commensurate with your computer. i.e. 96 dpi for a PC and 72 dpi for a Mac. If you use a higher resolution, the depth of field will REDUCE. 3. Run 'Preview' and then draw the limits round your image to outline the picture you want. 4. Run 'Scan' to get the image. You will probably need to adjust the brightness of the resulting individual picture, but that is it. 5. Clean the platen of pollen and debris between taking pictures. 6. I consider the lighting produced by this technique is superior to that obtained with most normal photography. 7. The actual size of the picture in Kb will already be quite small (about 20Kb depending on how big your sample is),but can be reduced further in image software. 8. You can produce background variations by sticking coloured paper to the platen lid. The pictures above were 'taken' with an Epson Perfection 1240U at 96 dpi. Note that scanners such as the Canon CanoScan FB630U which operate with LEDs instead of conventional optics, have zero depth of field and cannot be used for this purpose. |
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