Works the trick! I never thought about using a scanner for the purpose thinking that the depth of field would be way too shallow… Making them monochrome and collapsing the background to solid black also help as the images can have larger pixel size and not that much jpeg compression and still fit the 100 kB limit of this board.
It’s refreshing to see simple and timely yet succinct and helpful illustrations of knots being discussed instead of torrents of words.
It’s not as bad as it used to be, but you’ve still only got about a quarter inch of clearest depth. Even so, the focus falloff rate isn’t terrible. The rope in the attached image had parts over an inch off the deck. Not that much worse than for macro photography. Good enough for purposes of illustration–though I usually prefer to expand and flatten out the knots anyway, just to make the paths easier to follow. (Though that doesn’t work when trying to show the optimal dressing configuration.)
Side lighting was provided by a flashlight. One nice thing is that if you don’t move the rope, repeat scans have perfect registry, so if you want to play around with lighting effects, you can merge and blend just the bits you want from multiple scans.
It's refreshing to see simple and timely yet succinct and helpful illustrations of knots being discussed instead of torrents of words.
I like clear pictures and simple text, because I tend to think visually, and not so much in words. My mother had a very linguistic way of thinking, and she struggled to interpret images I thought were very simple and clear, but she could easily follow what seemed like convoluted speech to me. So the wordy descriptive posts might not be my style, but I can understand why other people might prefer them.