Flatbed scanners can be used for a lot more than scanning photos, artwork and text. They work well for scanning natural objects too. Feathers are just one example of reasonably flat objects that scan well.
Eye, Peacock Feather
My second thought was that it might make an interesting object to scan (the first thought was How did this get here?). I saved the feather to photograph and/or scan.
After laying the feather on the scanner glass, I put four plastic film container caps around the feather and put a piece of blue mat board on the caps. The caps kept the mat board from squashing the feather against the glass. The feather was scanned at 600 dpi, creating a 53 MB file.
The eye was cropped out of the center of the original scan, resampled in Photoshop 4.0 LE to a smaller file size, a white border was created, and the file was saved as a jpeg file. Then it was resized again in Jpeg Quality Explorer.
You are not limited to flat objects, natural or otherwise. Some 3D objects will scan also. See the link below.
Peacock Feather
This is a small, low resolution file of the feather from which the above file was extracted.
Added February 17, 2000
