Making an epic collage
When I moved from Liverpool to Bristol a few years ago, the first couple of weeks in my new house, I didn’t have an internet connection. I felt rather lonely, and decided to look through some images of my old friends. I grew to realise that I had an incredible amount of them.
So many, in fact, that I figured I might as well turn them into a piece of art…
I created a 7500×5000 pixel Photoshop document, and split it into a grid of 2,730 squares of 1cm each, with a small gap in between. These squares were to become the framework upon which I was going to crop the images of all my friends.
In the end, I lost track of how many photos I used, but it must have been about 200 or so. The whole job took more than 100 hours work and resulted in a 400 MB Photoshop file
I had Photobox print me a huge poster-sized photographic print of it (and by huge, I mean a whopping 20×30 inches). The poster is now hanging on the inside of my door. Whenever I let my eyes scan across the photos, I can’t help but think there’s a lot of people out there – so many people, so many friends, so many memories.
You can’t be lonely when you have a poster of that many people close to your heart on the wall!
Check out the much-higher-resolution version on Flickr, and if you fancy having a go at making your own, you can download the Photoshop grid (76kb ZIP file which expands to a 7.8mb(!) Photoshop PSD) I used to make this. Enjoy!
My day job, if it can be called that, is being a writer. I've got one book out there so far and it's awesome, so go ahead and buy a copy! It's available from 
In front of you, five hyperactive men with guitars, drums, and microphones. Behind you, five thousand fans. In your hands, a camera... You're going to need more than just a little bit of good luck to pull this one off. That's where this book comes in.
Take a Canon EOS 450D. Attach a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens. Hit the streets of London. See what happens.
Insights, suggestions and comments
I’ve done something similar using the website tabblo.com, it turned out really nice.
Thanks for the post. Love the idea!!
Beautiful.
I Think I will give it a go.
I used the free Picassa from Google and a collage can be made in 1 minute. But but you don’t have any kind of control. So to get a nice collage you have to click ‘generete’ button like 20 times before you have a nice collage of all your images. I used 280 images for on a print 50cm x 75 cm and looks very good! (next time i only use max 200 images)
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