PhotoFriday :: Creative Vision

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Eyes

ArtInspired :: In Search of the Essence

My search for what might be the essence of a subject or landscape bought me to  investigating google’s Deep Dream (aka Inceptionism) This is a fascinating bit of serendipity, some google researcher investigating how neural nets might learn to recognised objects in computer images were looking for ways to visual the way neural networks learn when they showed what was happening in the layers of the network starting with a base random noise image. The results are surprising, they include the embedded echos of things that are significant as the neural networks progressively classifies what is important in discovering the subject’s essence. These have variously been described as trippy and surreal dreanmimages (see the many echos of eye’s in the “Extra Trippy” version of my self-portrait on the right).The researchers have even publicly shared the code to do it, but for the less geeky of us I found a truly amazing website/service to help create this deep dream style of image called dreamscope.com. (its also available as an iPhone app)

mucking around with mosaics

I have been doing a lot of "playing" with photo mosaics, specifically the ones that make up another image. My software of choice has been andrea mosaic for a long long time. It is free to download, and gives you a lot of control over, as well as the tools to build the library of tile images you use. To be fair its user interface is old fashioned text forms, but perfectly servicable.

The past couple of weeks I have been trying out mosaic creator, it has a much snazzier user interface (it may not be any easier to use though) and has two important differences to andrea

1. it can generate an image using a range of tile shapes (eg triangle and hexagons)
2. It does not need to firstly compile libraries of tile images (you can give it individual images or directories of images)

This second feature got me thinking, I could use a standard image and get a photomosaic made from any given day's photos (providing I had taken enough photos). Here is how a few of the different day tilings worked out on my photo eye icon.