A PhotoMosaic has two basic elements:
It also needs some way of manipulating the photograph tiles into a mosaic that approaches the base image: For this project I used Andrea Mosaic Professional.
I didn't really know how many photos I'd need to make the PhotoMosaic work (the Mosaic Posters I created from the 9,100 photos that I took on our walk of the Bibbulmun Track used 6,500 photos), but I thought it was in the area of thousands. But I was hopeful that today's digital youth would not only have a large cache of digital photos but they'd also be very willing to help out on this adventurous project for Danni & Keren: so I wasn't too worried.
I set up this page for people to upload their photos. I'd regularly download them and replace them with a down-sampled version that is used in the Gallery.
Thanks to our contributors we received 162 photos:
The two families also contributed 1100 photos:
When the time came to get the base image I had a firm idea in my mind the sort of image I wanted: Lots of colour in front of an open scenic view.
Keren & Danni were so busy that the project was quite time constrained, and we didn't have too many opportunities for the photo-shoot. In some ways I would have liked to use the Three Sisters as the backdrop because it is so identifiable, but they actually couldn't fit in the drive up the mountains.
On the only day available for the photo-shoot, Sandi and I took them down to the Nepean River (because it was open, and hopefully identifiable as a river in the end mosaic) to shoot some photos to use for the base image. I'd borrowed a parasol from Monica with the thought of post colouring it. The day was overcast, which is great for the subjects of the photo, but not great for blue sky... and it's easy to see the already tired Keren & Danni waning toward the end!
So after selecting a suitable photo I cut in a blue sky and added colour to the parasol and increased the saturation of Keren and Danni's clothes.
Original Photo
Cleaned Photo
Base Image
