A while back, Ben created a program to create photo collages and mosaics. If you’ve seen one of our poster-size prints, then you know how cool it is to stand far away to see the main image and then get up close to see all of the little photos that make it up. If not, then you can zoom in and out one of these for a similar effect. Here’s a few that I created using only our photos from Europe. Click on the image to see the full size.
Photo of our shadow on a small medieval street in Southern France:
We call the one in the middle a “Photo Collage” because it places many photos on top of each other, rotated, and a bit messy looking. Ben says it’s like throwing your photos on the coffee table and arranging them to create an image. The one on the right is a “Photo Mosaic” in a sort of brick-pattern, which gives a more straight and organized look.
[Ben: The bricking pattern allows the program to use vertical and horizontal images – in this case 3 horizontal for each vertical, if you look close you should be able to spot the repeating pattern. Note that it intentionally overlaps the images too, for a more “organic” look. Any place that two or more photos overlap, the program actually decides algorithmically which image should overlap the other.]
Venice, Italy
Here’s a zoomed in look at the door in the middle of the photo. See how it creates the arched line out of photos?
Cool set-up and would love to know how ya did it? Is there a way to buy the program or to download it? I travel as well and shoot (check out my website) and would love to do this with some people pictures. I run a series on website in which i feature people I meet while traveling and would like to add a post like this if possible. Anyways, cool pictures and love your site… keep it up!
Hi T-roy, thanks for the comment. I’m glad you like the collages and website. I love your “Faces of…” series – very cool!
Ben wrote the program to do this himself, which took many many hours to perfect (he has a Computer Engineering background). Right now I’m sorry to say that we don’t have the program in a state that we could sell or share it. We’ve thought about doing so, just haven’t put the effort in. Right now we run the program as command-line on Linux, which doesn’t work for most people. Thanks for the encouragement though… someday maybe we’ll get it done!
This is your own program? You could make a lot of money from it, i’m sure. I love your mosaic pictures 🙂