At Home with Tech

While you wait patiently indoors for the remaining spring snow to melt, you might want to consider making a spring photo mosaic. If you’re organized, it may only take fifteen minutes or so…

It’s hard to believe it’s officially springtime…
As I write this, light snow has appeared outside my window. But to be fair to Mother Nature… We’re still some time away until the local terrain typically begins to catch up with the calendar…

So I figured it might be a good time to pay homage to the season by creating my own image of springtime.

Photo Mosaic
A couple years back, I discovered the fun world of computer-generated photo mosaic software and settled on Photo Mosaic as my own tool of choice.
It goes for $30 on the Mac App Store, and though it may not be the most advanced product available, it gets the job done for a reasonable price.
(Though there are other opinions out there…)

But as I gathered up all my spring nature shots from the past decade or so in my computer, I recognized a certain unremarkable uniformity to all of them.
(After all, I’m not a professional flower photographer.)

To properly represent the burst of enthusiasm that ‘spring’ should inspire, I decided I would have to expand the photographic definition.

What Does Spring Mean to You?
The essence of spring can mean so much more than blossoming flowers.

• It’s about new beginnings!
• Fresh ideas
• Origin stories
• Developmental milestones
• The spark of intellectual creation
• And of course, youth

I’ve currently got a whole lot of youth around me these days. My nearly five-year-old son is blooming in any number of ways right in front of me.
He’s even developed into a little budding photographer.

So with the inspiration of ‘family,’ as well as the idea of the past as the foundation to any future, I began adding photos to my ‘spring collection.’

Inspired by Tulips
Then, I snapped the perfect picture to represent the foundation of my little photo mosaic project… My son was drawing right behind a vase of yellow tulips.
As he lifted the paper to evaluate his work, I was right there with my Canon PowerShot camera to capture the moment.

Click.

I loaded this image along with my group of spring-inspired pictures into Photo Mosaic.

Then, the fun really began…

With a few more clicks on some presets and an open attitude towards a little experimentation, I quickly created three unique photo mosaics…

Which one do you prefer?
(I’ll probably print out all three!)

Flowers are Everywhere, Even if You Can’t See Them…
So… Happy Spring! It may not be particularly warm yet, but as long as you remind yourself that spring is much more than the flower bud outside your window, you’ll likely end up in the right frame of mind to greet the season… when it actually shows up.

Until then you might want to have some fun creating some cool photo mosaics!