Flatbed Scanner converted into Digital Camera

by Chris Garrett on January 19, 2006

Michael Golembewski has created some cool, strange, sometimes quite bizarre and disturbing photographs with his new creation, a digital camera built out of a flatbed scanner and the frame of an old second hand Horseman 450L monorail 4×5 camera.

The Scanner Photography Project

Several years ago, I built my first homemade digital camera. The idea was simple - I would take an ordinary flatbed scanner, and use it in place of photo paper with a large format camera.

The result is a 115 megapixel large format camera. This camera though has the unique quality of capturing still objects normally but distorting moving objects due to the combined movement of the scene and the scan. These distortions show up as twisted or extruded inhabitants of otherwise perfectly standard scenes.