Scanning For Intruders…

In my insatiable quest for toys, I finally picked up a flatbed scanner. I had been holding out trying to find a 2400 dpi model around here, but after playing around with it a bit, I doubt I’ll even use the full 1600 dpi of this model all that often (those files get huge!).

There is actually a practical reason for it. As part of the process of cleaning up around here, there are a bunch of things that I’d like to keep around, but just don’t have the space for: pictures, segments from magazines, comic strips, etc. So instead I’m going to scan them in and then I can ditch the originals. Second on the list is the comics found in the back of The Gateway student newspaper I picked up when I was a student at the UofA (besides the ones that already have their own scans online, like Space Moose or Bob The Angry Flower).

First though, was a promise I’d made to my mother to try and reproduce a picture from a photographic proof (the tiny little sample pictures you get to choose from for the final picture) of her parents. She’d tried taking it to photographers and getting them to reprint it, but they wouldn’t do it — apparently they don’t work off of other peoples’ proofs on general principle since it may be someone trying to scam the photographer into getting them the free sample proofs and then taking it to another, cheaper photographer for the final work.

Unfortunately in this case we don’t know who the original photographer was, whether he’s even still in business, or whether he’d even still have the negatives after all this time, and we can’t exactly take her parents down and have another picture taken when one of them is dead… So, we’ve had to take matters into our own hands and thus I’m trying to scan and reprint the photo based off this tiny little proof picture. This is the best I have so far:

(Shrunken down for web viewing, of course. The original file is 3403 pixels by 4797!)