>>2937976I think I just saw some website where someone built a scanner camera and I just approximated what they did. Pretty simple in concept really. A camera is just a box with a opening in one side that casts light onto the opposite surface. A flatbed scanner just reads whatever is placed onto its scanning surface. So just build a box with a hole on top of the scanner, and you got a camera.
I built bellows (2 nested boxes) out of black foamcore and mounted a magnifying glass lens in it. To alter my the aperture, I cut various sized holes in cardboard and held them it in front of the lens when shooting. Thinking back, if I understand things correctly, i suppose it was more or less an f2.5-f5 lens.
I built it on a Canoscan scanner since they were turning up at Goodwill at the time for under $10 each. Nice thing about those scanners is they're bus powered, so with a laptop you could take it anywhere. And I used XSane to shoot. Focusing was trial and error. I always wanted to go back and figure out focusing distances that I could mark on the bellows, but never did.
Further work would've involved disabling the lamp on the scanner and modifying xsane to ignore the lamp warning. But that was more technical than I was willing to undertake, and it worked well enough as is.
Pic. Canon dial 35 since I forgot to post it earlier.
