Project 28: Digital Mosaic.

For the following projects I'm moving into the realms of more art then photography in some ways because you're asked in this project to study digital mosaic making and then in the following project which I'll come to later its a multi facetted view but again I'll explain more about this in dew course.

With Mosaic the example of work you're given to look at was produced by David Hockney (see http://www.hockneypictures.com/ ), what he did was use a Polaroid camera to capture small areas of his chosen subject and then take the results and put them together as a mosaic/collage. Some of his best work in this area i think is when he used the technique to photograph famous landmarks like the Brooklyn bridge because it gives a familiar view a completely different feel and look. Its a very clever way of producing an image because although there are areas of the image that have been duplicated because he's having to overlap shots to be sure he's capturing the whole scene the final images does look wrong in anyway because there is still the recognition of what the subject is.

The other way of approaching the subject would be to use photoshop to stitch the images together to create a final view of a subject, you would still capture the subject in the same manner overlapping the shots as you work but its just a different way of displaying the final results.

For my attempt at this kind of image i went for the Hockney approach and the subject i selected was some rose's. The first step was to create a blank file to work on in photoshop, then with a grid visible over the top of the blank canvas i started to open the images and lay them in order into the file. Th image below is the final results of this process.

What i found i liked about this way of working was how the final image looks, as I'd already said you do end up with a small amount of repetition but this does seem to have much of an effect on the overall image plus i liked the way that by having the light changing as i shot you end up with darker and lighter frames which equally add to the effect. One down side to working like this i found was its a little difficult to always keep track of what areas you've shot and which you haven't. What i found worked best was to shot it the way i intended to lay it out in the final images. This did help alot but you still have to be very focused on what you're doing to keep track of your progress. Overall i really enjoyed working this way because of way it tests you in being able to fore see how the end product will appear as you work, i defiantly can see myself using this process in the future.