Scanning city textures with a handheld scanner

Published on Wed Jul 22, 2026 by David J Colbran
Last Updated on Wed Jul 22, 2026

Summer can be a quiet time for a commercial and business photographer.

The conference calendar quietens down a bit, corporate events take their annual breather, and there are less public relation shoots happening.

Suddenly I've got breathing room I don't usually get. Rather than just kicking back (well, maybe a little kicking back), I love using these quieter months to play. No client briefs, no deadlines, just me getting curious again about how I actually make images.

My new toy is a handheld scanner and I have been dragging it across brick walls, peeling posters, rusted railings and cracked pavements to capture all those textures the city's usually too busy for anyone to notice. It's a world away from photographing delegates at a conference centre or covering a festival stage – slower, weirder, a bit unpredictable, and honestly really good fun. There's something brilliant about not knowing quite what you'll get until I download the file back in the studio. It won't end up on every client shoot, but these little creative detours always feed back into my main work somehow – sharpening my eye, reminding me why I fell in love with image-making in the first place, and keeping things fresh for when the busy season rolls back round.

Scanning city textures with a handheld portable wand scanner means I can gather raw, tactile urban visual data like asphalt, peeling paint, and typography. It bypasses standard photography by using direct-contact sensor sweeps to create unique analogue data, smudgy motion effects, and happy-accident glitches.

#scanner #scanning #citytextures #liverpool #davidjcolbran

Author: David J Colbran