pulled the fresnel lens out of the overhead projector and placed it on top of the scan bed. uh. i dont really know what i'm doing here. but i think??? that the fresnel might "correct" the light heading to the sensor? to maybe yield a more consistent exposure over the whole frame? shot one is with the fresnel facing in, second is with it facing out. in and out here relative to where the light comes from in the overhead projector since im attempting to reverse its optics for capturing images? uhhh im fairly certain the fresnel needs to be a set distance away from the scanner to actually "work" but its certainly Doing Something here. oh and all the crap on the photo is from the nasty plastic screen on the scanner itself, i'll remove it once i'm more confident with what i'm doing here.

thank you thrift store
this one is powered entirely off usb and plays nice with xsane and plays nicely with my box camera and is super super light and small
finallyyyyyy a good scanner
now i can get to light sealing the box camera and measuring out focus distances and stuff. hehehehehehehehehehe
image #1&2 was a test shot
image #3 was me messing with the scanner while it was doing something weird (i input weird settings)
image #4 is a portrait with a flashlight held pointed at subjects face. focus was set to infinity because i wasnt about to do the old focus scan refocus shuffle. looks nice and spooky.

i found a dedicated scanner! controlled via usb! works right out of the box with xsane!

but uhhhh... it sees differently.
in the first image, you can see the wild depth of field that it's capable of
and in the second you can see that it sees through a lens... how my eye would. or how another lens would perceive it.
it's not scanning the projected image from the lens like the epson does. it's... taking a photo much more how a camera with a lens mounted to it already would. and i have NO idea why. i guess it's a different type of scanner? maybe i can mod it to behave the way i want? is this why i see people mention needing a ground glass in the setup? if so then why doesn't the epson need it? sooo many questions.

all the tinkering has paid off, i've got xsane working to control the scanner!

hoisted the thumbcutter up on the window and took some backyard photos. looking past all the exposure problems, these shots feel so wild to me even though they're so mundane. feels like there's lots of depth, sense of space? idk

the previous strip of good exposure in a sea of darkness is now a strip of clip with a small gradient of good exposure around it, then quickly fading off, but with much better corner details than the indoor shot.

i do believe this is a scanning problem and not a lens one, because looking back at the scannographs with my nikon lens in them reveals that those tiny image circles also possess the top-bottom vignette. interesting.

while i still do not fully understand the scanner ive seen mentions that there is slight parallaxing as the scanning head moves. maybe this means that at the top and bottom the light comes in at a shallow angle, and suffers loss, then head-on in the center where it's picked up nice and bright. how is this counter-acted? probably through modifying the scanner, which I cannot do with my houses printer/scanner :P

i hunted some thrift stores today but they have piles and piles of combo printer/scanners, no dedicated scanners. soon. soon progress will be able to be made...

fair warning im very sleep deprived right now and may soon catch the flu from my housemates so maybe this is all the ramblings of a mad plushie before certain doom.

brought to you by the world's worst very large format camera

something about my setup creates wicked vignetting with a long horizontal line of good exposure (im guessing the shape is due to the scanning head being a line)

the lens being adapted is the lens from my overhead projector. i learned a nice bit about optics putting it all together based on intuition, took a few hours of fiddling to get to this current setup

a friend has retrieved the Df and she wanted to take pics with it before sending it to me... and uh....
while the shutter fires, the mirror locks up and has to be forced back into place by hand.
so nearly 3 months and like $200 wasted. pissed off about the repair guy saying its fixed and leaving it in this state without even mentioning it. tomorrow when he opens up shop im calling him to ask him what he did and from there uh. i dunno, maybe he'll fix it. but if he's gonna charge me for another repair i'm just gonna cut my losses and try to sell shit off on ebay and see where that lands me i guess.
i'm trying not to despair until i have a clearer picture after talking to the guy tomorrow but this is pretty crushing.

edit: hes gonna look at it, but itll be weeks before my friend heads back into town to give it to him... this things gonna be outta commission longer than its been in commission...

anyway, photos.
moving the lens with the scanning head produces unpredictable warping. i think this is because i'm not moving it perfectly relative to its movement. this produces some very abstract images.

i've also observed that any image focused through the lens is always greyscale. while i dont know much about scanners, i think this is because the scanner reads color by blasting colored lights at whats on the bed and reading the reflection back, so focused images from elsewhere produce no color data.

these shots were taken by a sunny window, indirectly lit. it seems like its kinda easy to blow out the highlights but adjusting aperture easily controls this. the brighter the ambient light the more you can see vague out of focus forms in the background of the shots, at a certain level of ambient dimness things are pretty well isolated.

something something man ray
something something technicalities
proof of concept
featuring my hand seen thru my arsat n 50mm lens, "mounted" to the scanner via a toilet paper roll i've cut to about the flange focal distance of f mount (the focus was missed but for how small it is in frame it matters little)