Margaret Helthaler's Profile on BoundlessGallery.com

I enjoy taking a closer look at small, often unnoticed, details in the landscape. In my Scanography series, I use a flatbed scanner as an alternative to a traditional camera. The images are captured by collecting tiny flowers and weeds and scanning the plants directly at a very high resolution. This process enables me to enlarge the diminutive details of each plant many times their original size – revealing colors, shapes and textures that are not usually discernible. Many of the flowers and grass seeds I collect are as small as than the nail on my pinkie finger. The scanner’s shallow depth of field, combined with the abstract watercolors I place in the background during the scanning process, lends a painterly quality to the final enlarged images. Thus, with humble weeds, [see more]

I enjoy taking a closer look at small, often unnoticed, details in the landscape. In my Scanography series, I use a flatbed scanner as an alternative to a traditional camera. The images are captured by collecting tiny flowers and weeds and scanning the plants directly at a very high resolution. This process enables me to enlarge the diminutive details of each plant many times their original size – revealing colors, shapes and textures that are not usually discernible. Many of the flowers and grass seeds I collect are as small as than the nail on my pinkie finger. The scanner’s shallow depth of field, combined with the abstract watercolors I place in the background during the scanning process, lends a painterly quality to the final enlarged images. Thus, with humble weeds, I present a contemporary twist to a theme most notably associated with the late Georgia O’Keeffe.

I have also been experimenting with digitally creating the TTV effect. TTV or "Through the Viewfinder" is the photographic process of taking a picture with one camera through the lens of another camera. Typically, it creates an image with a distinct dark border and some lens distortion with dust and imperfections. Since many of my images are captured without a lens (using a scanner or pinhole camera) I thought it would be interesting to explore the unique results achieved by bringing these divergent processes together. [hide]