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Hello my name is Stephen Diehl, and I teach in the Biomed department, and normally I'm
teaching photo 1 and nature photography, but this class, scanners as cameras, is something
that was born out of my research with dragonflies. I have been doing a lot of scanning of dragonflies
using Epson V700 scanners and noticed the incredible detail, as one would expect that
the scanners could produce, and started thinking about well what if we use other things other
than dragonflies, and started some assignments in photo 1 class and decided that well perhaps
students might want to study using scanners for and entire quarter. Some assignments that
we do have to do with liquids and you might say, liquids on scanners?. We protect the
scanners with think sheets of plastic and we also work with standard things like feathers,
pine cones, road kills, whatever we can find and bring in. The seafood assignment is one
of our favorites, we get a lot of very interesting images of squids, octopus, lobsters. One student
was even photographing live fish, her own pet fish, that she managed to keep alive and
they were not destroyed in the process of making this movie. You just never know what's
going to happen and what's going to be coming through the doors and being put on the scanners.
I was going to bring my cats so we could have a cat scan but, I didn't make that happen
yet. We're trying other things as well. Students have four weeks to work on their own projects
and we've had some lively discussions today about, what we might entice people to do as
a subject matter in here for those projects. The scanner, which is a camera, is basically
a box light device as we all know, we probably have them in our own offices or homes and
there's a line of um, pixels, photo receptors that sweep across an area, and the other thing
is that is unique about this is that the light source is practically in alignment so it's
as though you are taking a photograph with a giant ring light. It give you a very unusual
lighting, there are practically no shadowing at all. The other thing that's interesting
about the process is that, you can actually move the object while the scanning is taking
place, and elongate or create some really interesting special effects while the scanning
is taking. Some students that were taking self portraits would lay their heads down
and roll their head as the scanner went by to create sort of a stretched out look to
the photographs. You can get very, very high resolution scans with these. The V700 Epson's
are scanning over 6000 pixels per inch, and we can go in and get documents that are many
gigabytes on a large area, so a student or faculty member or anybody can go in an study
a very small area, yet have a huge file that we can present or print from, or study. It
has both scientific applications as we've used in our dragonfly work or for just for
artistic reasons as we're doing here in this class.