Experimental Photography Methods

Richard Burn

Scanography

Scanography is an experimental photography method. It most commonly uses a photo scanner and a CCD (charge-coupled device. Using a scanner can allow an artist to capture images that would not be otherwise accessed to. The technique to doing this is placing an object on the photo scanner & simply scanning it. You can see this specifically on the pear photograph. That shows scanography in it simplest form. You can also tell from this photograph how shallow the depth of field is (usually just half an inch before objects become out of focus) & how the access to light differs from a normal photograph. Adding to this, you cannot change such features either, as the machine is only a scanner.

On a scanner there is a light that captures whatever is placed on its surface. This can allow you to produce distorted image. Like the face (top left) & CD (bottom right). The person does this by following the light. These distorted images allow for interesting kinds of photography which would not of been able to produced using a standard camera.

As you can see from the top right photograph, that different parts of a scan can make up an interesting collage piece. Although what you can take photographs of is limited, what you can do gives you endless choice to what you can do with objects & peoples faces. No two images will be the same.

Due to most the scanner beds being made from glass, you have to be careful with how much pressure you put on the glass & you also have to be careful to keep it clean. You can place a clear piece of plastic on top of the glass to protect & you should still get the same desired effect.

GlitchingGlitching allows you to alter and distort a photograph. This will usually be done in

post-production when dealing with photography. There are many different ways to do this on Photoshop. What the glitching does is alter the pixels or a block of pixels in a photograph

One way to add glitching to a photograph in Photoshop is to use HDR Toning which can be found in the image section of the access bar. This allows you to alter parts of a photograph like Gamma, Exposure & Detail. Below I used this setting to edit the photograph below. You can add layers that will allow some parts of the image to look normal and other parts to look glitched.

There are other ways to add glitching effect to your photographs. Tools like the distort tool, pixelate & noise create interesting glitching effects on a photograph. Adding multiple layers and changing colours and moving certain aspects around also add to the glitch effect. An example of the colour change glitching is the middle right photograph.

There are direct apps that can distort an image for you straight away. One app that does this is called Glitché & uses different features such as Glitch, Scan and Pixel to automatically give you the desired effect.

Some pieces of glitching work are harder to do than others, for example the top right photograph appears to have more work done to it than the bottom left. The amount of work and skill required depends on what you want the overall photograph to look like in the end