A PhotoMosaic has two basic elements:

1. The base image
2. A library of lots of photographs to use for the mosaic tiles

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.

Library Photos

I knew from Keren & Danni's Mosaic that I'd need a good number of photos 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 (which was one of the reasons that I was going to duotone each photo, as that would give me four-times the photos to use). 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 Monica & Nathanael.

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 416 photos:

• KerenAndDanni: 156 photos
• BJ: 46 photos
• Fahey: 36 photos
• LukeGaliazzo: 23 photos
• MeredithSchwilk: 21 photos
• NelsonFamily: 20 photos
• MeaghanLeahy: 16 photos
• RayMirabito: 13 photos
• FranLeighton: 11 photos
• Matt: 11 photos
• JB: 9 photos
• KerenMowbray: 8 photos
• MichaelaDolan: 8 photos
• Keren: 7 photos
• BeatrixBaer: 6 photos
• BeckWansey: 5 photos
• JanneRayMaggieBent: 5 photos
• WilliamSouthers: 4 photos
• LeeMowbray: 4 photos
• MaryCarney: 3 photos
• MerlynMathew: 2 photos
• Nathanael: 1 photo
• AmanadaCleland: 1 photo

The two families also contributed 1229 photos:

• Monica's family photos: 278
• Nathanael's family photos: 951

Base Image

When the time came for the PhotoShoot to get the base image I had a fairly good idea in my mind of the sort of image I wanted: The couple in primary colours in the midst of a colourful, blooming shrubbery.

Sandi and I took them up to the Everglades (we'd checked out the suitability the previous week and they had a reputation for good afternoon teas and being a historic garden it was manicured as well as flowering) to shoot some photos to use for the base image.

So after selecting a suitable photo I cut in a blue sky and added colour to Nathanael's shirt and finally had to tweak some facial features to get the mosaic to work the way I wanted.

I found when generating the mosaic that AndreaMosaic, because of the resolution and tile size, didn't always interpret the image perfectly; I found that tweaking the base image by highlighting areas, adding or removing shadows gave AndreaMosaic the help it needed to get a better mosaic.