In my on-going quest of finding ways to make nice and interesting textures (one of the reason that I’m on the lookout for an old analog Xerox machine), I read a tutorial somewhere (I really should make more use of ⌘ + B) where the guy writing had a pretty neat trick to create his own textures. He simply made a scan of empty air with the lid open. This, surprise surprise, only resulted in a empty, white image. Not very useful.
Until he bumped up the levels and a natural, colored distortion appeared as a frame around the image.

Hey, I just remembered! It was James Davies‘ tutorial over at PSDTuts+ and I was wrong, he scanned with the lid down. I however, scanned an empty bed with the lid open and got a completely different result. Especially when I inverted the colors.

The image was scanned at 600dpi so this copy is severely reduced in size and resolution but the details are pretty nice when observed close enough, as in the image below (click to enlarge).

Next I scanned my hand but held it an inch or two above the scanner to produce this blurry (due to both motion and being out of focus) image.

This was clearly at a time when I was listening to the Year Zero album by Nine Inch Nails.