To all those scanning shells with flatbed scanners... Olivier has covered some of the info needed when creating images for the web, but a flatbed scanner is really only designed for... well, flat stuff. Clams work well, as do chitons and the apertures of cowries, conchs and several other things. If you are bent on putting up images of pointy, three dimensional specimens, you really need a camera. There are lots of fine digital cameras now and you can even use (as I do) a video-tape camera to feed live video into a digitizing adapter. (For me, it's a Snappy.) I know this was mentioned before but bear in mind the geometry involved with getting too close to the subject. Distortion will occur; the front spines or parts of the shell appear disproportionately large because their distance to the lens is considerably less than the distance from the farthest visible parts of the specimen to the lens -- relative to the size of the shell and the distance of the lens. Photographers solve this problem by shooting their "close-ups" from as far away as they can. Close-up lenses or extention tubes are added to a telephoto lens to 'get back' from the subject. In the end, all of this means that a scanner can only do so much. As your desired effect becomes more complex, your equipment will have to change. I hope this helps some. Aloha, makuabob (Bob Dayle) ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com