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Paul Walters | all galleries >> Galleries >> My Personal Favorites > Montage
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Montage

This is the end result of my year long project where I took a picture every day of my life from my birthday on May 22nd, 2003 to my birthday on May 22nd, 2004. This idea has caught on with quite a few people starting a year long project of their own since I started mine. I very much enjoyed the project, but now that it's over, this is the result. This is obviously a smaller version of the actual montage which is 6000x9000 to print as 20x30 @ 300 dpi.


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Guest 12-Aug-2006 23:00
Wow! Stunning montage and great idea!
Guest 24-Dec-2005 20:19
Great idea, Paul. I'm only 5 days into my PAD project, but this is inspiration for me to "carry-on" and hopefully be able to create a montage of my own.
Guest 19-Oct-2004 16:02
Paul,

This is beautiful. I'm only 122 days into my first photo-a-day project, but this mosaic of images inspires me. I think I would like to do something similar with mine when it's complete.... great work :)
Digital Lady 24-Jul-2004 19:21
hi paul

how are you i love a lot your idia i will do the photos of 1 year from my birth day 9 of aug
love it
Paul Walters26-Jun-2004 05:25
Hi Wayne Huang. I'm actually FINISHED with this now, and there are no empty squares. You'll notice that some of my pictures take up two squares (they are two squares wide). This is in order to overcome the problem with having a total of 384 squares. Also, this year had 366 days because it's Leap Year. And one last point is that I used the bottom right square for my signature, and actually recorded both my birthday at the start and my birthday at the end which comes to 366+1+1 for a total of 368 pictures. :) Thanks for your comments, Wayne! I've also made a photo mosaic image with the over 3000 pictures I considered using during the year for my project. I'll probably post that soon. It's just very big, so I haven't decided if I'll post it or not yet.
Guest 26-Jun-2004 04:46
btw, i see you have 16 images across. there'll be empty space in this rectangle because 365 is an odd number. just a thought
Guest 26-Jun-2004 04:43
this is very interesting paul.. the individual images in this case aren't of significance and if you squint your eyes it's an abstract piece and all i see are the colors and the colors that comprise this image is individual to only you the artist.
Guest 06-Jun-2004 23:58
Congratulations on an excellent set of pics for the year. I have recently started my own PaD and like the 20" x 30" montage. However, my 1.25"x1.25" images seem stretched in ratio were yours do not. Is there something I am leaving out? I am using Photoshop 6.0 and resizing the images to 1.25" x 1.25" @ 300 dpi.
Cagie 06-Jun-2004 13:16
Paul! When are you going to roll out the posters?? :)
wpmadden26-May-2004 23:29
great job Paul! We have enjoyed watching your photos throughout the year. How long before you won't have the daily urge and need to get the PaD? :-)
Great closure on a project well done, love Bill & Bear
Guest 24-May-2004 02:09
what a great project!
Paul Walters23-Jan-2004 15:32
Hi Susan!

I use Photoshop 7 to do it. To start with, each of my PaD images are edited and saved as the file name with PaD preceding it. The images are saved at 1.25 inches square at 300 Dots per Inch. I save them as a JPeg file at quality level of 9 in Photoshop.

Because of the size of the 20" x 30" final montage, and the difficulty working with that size of an image, I split it into three parts 20" x 10" x 300 dpi. I set Photoshop up with Grid patters every 1.25" square, turn on grids, Turn on Snap to Grids, and paste the PaD images into this 20" x 10" image, one per day. I save the image as a PSD (Photoshop native file format) so as not to lose any quality.

Once I've finished the year off, finishing each 1/3rd of the 20" x 30" montage, I'll create a new 20" x 30" blank image in Photoshop, then paste each 20" x 10" montage piece that I've created together to make the full image. It'll be large, but that's okay. Then I'll save it (likely as a JPeg with quality of 10) and send it off to OFoto for printing.

If you don't have Photoshop, I'm not sure how to help you. If you do have Photoshop and want further explanations, let me know!

Paul
Susan23-Jan-2004 07:17
Hi Paul, lovely photos. Can u share with me how to paste and compress the photos? I will be running into space problem soon ... Susan
Paul Walters14-Oct-2003 03:34
Michael: The reason I gave the extra space was my original plan was to have a 16 square section in the middle of the image to use as the montage title that would describe what it was (year, photographer, etc.) I've since decided that the title isn't as important as the pictures and don't want to use up that much space for it, so I'm ending up with a few extra squares. I figure it will either extend 18 days beyond the year, or I'll use up the extra squares with Panoramic days, or some title for the collection. I also wanted to make the pictures SQUARE which works just as well for Portrait as Landscape subjects, where 16x23 wouldn't fit within a 20x30 montage as perfect squares. If I was starting all over... I'd probably still do it like I am, but it's possible I would do 16x23 with slightly portrait pictures rather than square.
Guest 03-Oct-2003 09:41
Hi Paul. Why did you decide to make the montage consist of 16x24=384 pictures instead of 16x23=368, which is enough to cover a whole year including the leap year in 2004?
Carol Maldonado 09-Jul-2003 16:29
Paul! Your project is turning out awesome! Can't wait to see the finished project!! Keep it up!! How many more strips to go??? :)