Another found object shot. This is a light bulb I pulled out of the socket a few days ago. I liked the pattern that the smoke left inside the bulb when the filament burned, so I set it aside to photograph as a rainy day project. Today it’s raining, so…

To ‘photograph’ this I simply set it on a flat bed scanner and scanned it. I used the transparency adapter, so the light was projected through the bulb to capture the luminosity that makes the bulb interesting. Only a small area of the light actually touches the scanner bed, so Newton Rings (ugly more’ patterns that appear when you try to scan transparent items laid directly on the scanner bed) weren’t a problem.

I’ve been surprised at how much ‘photography’ is done with flatbed scanners. I guess that scanners _are_ cameras of a sort – they are just cameras that cannot focus more than a half an inch or so away from the front of the ‘lens’. You can get pretty huge, high resolution images, though lighting options and portability are limited!

I actually had to touch this up a fair amount – apparently the burnt out filament left behind not only smoky residue, but ash as well. It was ugly as distracting, so I spent more than a little time cloning it out.