Killing a Fly with a Ukulele: Photo Mosaics

I am the Mum.
If life was a circus, I would be the plate-juggling lady with monkeys on her shoulders who stands on one leg on a horse's back as it canters around the ring.

I am the Writer.
I use too many commas, dashes and dot-dot-dots, and I often start sentences with conjunctions because I like my blog to look the way it sounds in my mind.

I am the Hero.
Life is a bit like a superhero action comic, except that the superheroes are tiny children dressed in super-suits who possess no actual powers, while I just get them food, break up fights and clean their super-suits.

09 November 2008

Photo Mosaics

Some of you have been kind enough to say how you've liked the photo mosaics I've done of my kids, and asked how it's done.

Well, I put my photos into Photoshop, do the maths to resize them how I want, then I count the number of pixels, pull out my calculator again and I crop ... oh hang on, that was what I thought you had to do before I found the Mosaic Maker in Flickr. Try it!

I'm sure there are plenty of other websites out there to make photo mosaics with, because on other people's blogs, I see patterns of compiled photos that Flickr can't give me. So I know 'there's more than one way to skin a cat' as one of my old school teachers used to say.

But for putting my completed mosaics into something like this (below), I use Scrapblog through my Photobucket account. I haven't found they print nicely to photo paper though.

4 comments:

Heather said...: Yay! Thanks for sharing your secrets! When I first started reading the post, I was all "a CALCULATOR? MATH? PIXEL SIZE? NOOOO!" so thank goodness I kept reading! :D

I'm gonna have to fancy up some pictures with that scrapblog site and make my blog all purty like yours! Woo-hoo, less time than ever for housework!

(If you never hear from me again, it is because the mountain of ((clean and folded)) laundry piled atop my dresser has buried me in an avalanche as I cheerfully ignored it to sit here at my computer.); 09 November, 2008 23:09
Queenie Jeannie said...: Ohhhhh! I love that!! I'm totally running over and trying it out myself today. Didn't know Photobucket did that!!!!

You bloggy people are so smart!!; 10 November, 2008 00:25
Jen said...: too bad you can't print them b/c it would be an awesome card.; 10 November, 2008 04:42
Tracy P. said...: Great post! I love getting tips from other bloggers, and need to pass them on more often myself.

I haven't tried to print the mosaics (or a scrapbook page with them), but I have had reasonably good luck using them in a Shutterfly photo book. (Do they serve Aus.?).

Also, my mosaics usually seem to me to be washed out, so I download them onto my computer, turn up the saturation, and then upload them BACK to flick'r before I post them. I wonder if they would print better with the saturation turned up.; 10 November, 2008 09:10

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(Click the links below for my Post Labels)

This is the story of me, Givinya de Elba, and my adventures with Mr de Elba, my children Buzz, Jessie, and Woody and our dog, Bullseye. We have plenty of good times, some weird times and a huge dose of drama.

Some of my posts are sad, lots are funny and sometimes I subject you to my pondering. We have our celebrations, when I write a decent poem I share it with you and when I'm held hostage, I do the occasional meme.

Other people who are special to me feature here too, some of them being my Dad, my Mum, my Crazy Sister (her blog), my Wee Brother and my good friend Hippomanic Jen (her blog).

I am a part-time speech pathologist, and try to cook, keep a garden alive and take photos that don’t make us look like we are pharmaceutically affected or dangerously homicidal.

I often suffer from Mumfail but I keep hanging on to the One who picks me up when I fall. If you email me, I’ll answer.

And if all that is too much, just read my “Best Of."

No, they didn't.

They called me Katherine.

I go by Kate.

I came up with the pseudonym Givinya de Elba in highschool and it was based on a joke from an episode of Dad's Army called 'A Soldier's Farewell.'

In the episode, after eating too much toasted cheese, Captain Mainwaring dreams he is Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. I don't remember much about the episode other than Mainwaring telling his loyal men (Jones, Pike and Godfrey) that he has been exiled to the island of Elba.

Jones quips, "Hence the expression - Givin' ya the Elber!" (giving you the elbow, i.e., pushing you around.) I thought that Givinya de Elba was a half-decent pseudonym for someone who likes to joke and push people around, and I stuck with that.

My sweet niece ...

09 November 2008

Photo Mosaics

4 comments: