All my friends and lovers

All my friends and lovers
Will leave me alone
To try to have a little fun
One way or another
I just wish I had known
To go out walking in the sun
To find out if you were the one
- Counting Crows

About a year ago, I moved from Liverpool to Bristol, and 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 7500x5000 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 it printed in 20x30 inches, and the poster is now hanging on the inside of my door. Every time I feel lonely, I let my eyes scan across the photos. So many people. So many friends. So many memories.

(the larger-view image is about a fourth of the final image size, and is required to get an impression how much time went into this. If you want to have an even closer look, and if you decide to download the full size, it's about half the final image size.)

You can't be lonely when you have a poster of that many people close to your heart on the wall. I encourage everyone to make one for themselves.