Scanography: Fine Art Photography

by Margaret Helthaler
(Catskill Mountains, NY)

Yellow Weed

I enjoy taking a closer look at small, often unnoticed, details in the landscape. In my Roadside Flowers series, I use a flatbed scanner as an alternative to a traditional camera. The images are captured by collecting tiny flowers and weeds I find growing along the road and scanning the plants directly at a very high resolution. This process enables me to enlarge the diminutive details of each plant many times their original size – revealing colors, shapes and textures that are not usually discernable. Many of the flowers and grass seeds I collect are as small as than the nail on my pinky finger.

The scanner’s shallow depth of field, combined with the abstract watercolors I place in the background during the scanning process, lend a painterly quality to the final enlarged images.

Thus, with humble weeds, I present a contemporary twist to a theme most notably associated with the late Georgia O’Keeffe.