I very much liked the mosaic work found in the temples and pagodas I saw in Myanmar, and being inspired by the idea when I got back I made a digital mosaic based on a photograph of a pedestal mosaic at Shwedagon, Yangon.
The mosaic is made up of around 5,000+ images made from 50+ photographs of Buddha statues in the Myanmar collection. If you click on the slide above you can access the high-definition version (2304 x 3072px 2.5MB), and will be able to see the miniature photographs that it is made from, a section of which is on the right.
The picture was made using Foto-Mosaic-Edda an excellent free software from Germany.
It works like this, you first have to make a database of photographs from your collection. Just point the software to a folder you want to include and add it in to a new or current database. You can make different ones.
I made three when trying to make this mosaic: one of the whole Myanmar collection, another of the decorative mosaics themselves, and one – which turned out best in this case – of photographs of the Buddha statues.
You then find a photograph that will be used as the basis, in this case it was one of the photos in the Decorative Mosaics in the Temples and Pagodas in Myanmar that I posted yesterday.
And basically that is it, the software then finds the best matching photos to make up the mosaic and produces it – you can tweak certain settings as much as you want, including output size of course, and then save the image.