A portrait of the artist as a direct-scan 3-D object.
 
This is a 10 dpi scan.  I just leaned over the scanner for a lo-o-o-ong time, trying to hold still and keep my nose from making a flat spot on the glass.  No retouching at all--although I can think of a few things this guy really needs fixed!

I scanned at 10 dpi thinking--mistakenly--that I wouldn't have to hold still so long, but I realized later that even with a subject this large, 100 dpi would probably have gone at the same speed.  (The computer has 64 megs of ram.)  Bigger images and higher resolution, however, do take considerably longer, and that limits subjects to ones that will hold still more or less indefinitely.

This image is too small to get much idea of how it differs from a photographic image, so I'll blow it up in the browser to the point where the pixels start showing--400 x 425.
 

 
 
 
 
The image is fuzzy because of the low-resolution scan.  But you can see how the lighting drops off rapidly at the sides, giving the head a strange appearance (not that it needed help).  At first I thought of this as a contrast problem, but it's really that the differential of lighting is so great from foreground to background.

The depth of field in scanned images is much greater than I'd expected, although that isn't so apparent here.  The photocopier experiment that got me started, on the other hand, is so contrasty that you can't tell much about either lighting or depth of field.

The tilt is accidental, caused by the placement of the scanner that required me to lean over at an angle.  The original image was upside down, too, but I flipped it vertically in the scanner software before saving it.

The background in this image appears to be sort of brownish.  I'm not sure what caused that, except that I left the scanner's lid on--just stuck my head in under it.  The underside of the lid is black on this Microtek ScanMaker 600, and it may be what's visible there.  In later scans I took the lid off altogether, and that made the background appear black or dark grey in most of the scans.  I made some of the scans at night, with the room lights off, trying to get a completely black background.  When I get around to it, I'll try some side- and back-lighting.
 

 
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Don Maxwell