Capturing Memories of Your Travels

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Whether with pen or in picture, everyone has a different way to preserve special memories from their trips and travels. While I have created scrapbooks and photo albums of my past vacations, and I've heard of others making calendars and collages, I've never known anyone to make a photo mosaic. 

Tower Bridge

So imagine my surprise when my fiance gave me a beautiful photo mosaic of the Tower Bridge in London for our 3-year anniversary. Each of the more than 1000 pictures that make up this mosaic are from our trip this summer to Europe and our Caribbean cruise two summers ago. Now we'll have so many of the memories from our trips together in one beautifully intricate photo to hang on our wall.

So how can you make your own photo mosaic? Kris used a free program called Andrea Mosaic to help him automatically insert the pictures as tiles. After pre-populating the pictures, he went through and selected by hand the pictures he wanted to swap out and include based on the a color scheme needed for each slot.     

He also created mosaics of Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and Sacra Couer in Paris. You can also check out sample mosaics on Andrea's site along with a tutorials and the downloadable software.

Notre Dame

Just be sure when you go to get your masterpiece printed, you make sure the vendor is aware that your print job is a very large file. You may have to go somewhere other than a basic run-of-the-mill 1-hour photo center such as Target or Walgreens. Kris had our photo mosaics printed at Wolf Camera, and they came out beautifully!   

  

Sacra Couer