The Garden Worm blog Digging up the best dirt on gardening!

Over on the Gardening Gone Wild blog, they sponsor a monthly photo contest called ‘Picture This.’ The one for this month (here) is on scanner photography. As many of you know, that is one of our favorite methods and we love to use our images in various ways – printed on paper as cards or calendars like this . . .

or printed on fabric and made into pillows or bags, or used in decoupage on wood or glass followed by decorative painting such as for our birdhouses or clocks (explore our website at FleurDesigns).

My sister in Texas and I do this together so we have access to many different types of flowers. We like bright and colorful combinations since we mostly scan during the summers and create the fun stuff during the long winters (at least here in upstate New York). We love to surprise each other with the designs that we can come up with.

Essentially, our scanner photography consists of collecting some flowers and/or foliage or other botanical geegaws, laying them on the flat scanner bed, and pressing ‘scan.’ We have found, however, that the scanner depth of resolution makes a difference. My sister’s scanner broke and she had a difficult time finding another that was acceptable. My scanner, an old HP ScanJet 6200C, does a great job.

Once we have obtained the digital image, we trim it and might remove the scanner background in our photoediting software. At this point, it is essentially ready for use. We may further enhance it with various graphical elements such as borders or different backgrounds to create variations on the design as shown below. Even so, flowers remain the prime element in our designs!

This last image is one of our favorites! What could be better to celebrate fall than sunflowers?

All images and designs ©2001-2010 by Judith Cowles for FleurDesigns, Just the Gardener, and The Garden Worm blog. No material may be reproduced without explicit written permission.