Seems like all my material explanations begin with, I scanned it first and then….I think I used the scanners upstairs more than the painters or printmakers, I would pass their enormous studios with arms piled full of images and paper, and the machines would have the same preview I left the night before. Scanning is usually more time consuming than people think, and generally far less complicated—my professors seemed to think it was either a very tricky process or like using a copy machine, which can be a very tricky process. I scanned slides for the office last summer, a ridiculous waste as the new slide scanner was hooked up to a very old, incredibly slow computer, and thankfully this summer that has been rectified. I have been working for my old ‘advisor’, converting her slides into digital images, scanning the lectures she gave out of state this summer. It has been nice to see the lecture artists without having sit in, and to see the progression of her textiles beginning in the 1980’s
Slide scanners are obviously different from the large, flat bed Epson’s I use (and want), and like all my knowledge I know what I have needed to know for my own work and little outside of it—why these kind of jobs are good for me. I generally set my “target” size and scan to the scale am printing, but the slide scanner scans the actual size of the slide at a high (4000) resolution, which seems to make sense for uncertain later uses. The program the scanner uses is quite willful, and unlike the Epson preview it simply does not allow you to make changes, seems you can request it nicely to do, or not to do, certain things, and hope for the best. It took me a long time to figure out the correct way to insert the slide—how many possibilities could there be?—but it is counter intuitive and when put in the wrong way it simply crops the slide down, for some reason unknown to me. I let it do just what it wanted, thinking it probably knows best.