Your Scanner as a Microscope

The idea is simple: Take small objects, put them into your scanner and scan them with great resolution. Then zoom into the scanned image and explore the world of microcosm! 

Here some tips and hints for getting good results:

• Many interesting objects aren't flat so you cannot close the lid of the scanner (or do not want to close it because you do not want to squash your fragile objects). The resulting scans are sometimes mostly black. To avoid this put a piece of paper over your objects to be scanned. It will reflect the light from the scanner and result in better lit images.
• Increase the scan resolution when scanning. If you know the physical resolution you scanner is capable of, use that. If you don't know it, try 1200 dpi.
  
• Don't use more than 4800 dpi. The resulting images may get too big for your computer to handle!
• Don't scan at full size (e.g. Letter format)! Use the preview function of your scanning program and only scan a small region of interest. Again, otherwise the scanned image might get very big!
  
• A scanner with a good physical resolution will of course get you the best images. But also cheap scanners already can reveal amazing details. (See scans below, we used a very cheap scanner)
  

So here are a few examples we did.

I found a dead dragonfly and a fly on our window sill, so we tried it:

And here we scanned a printed card, where you can see you the different colors are created by mixing a few standard colors:

Do you have suggestions what else to scan?