Pro’s challenge Make a mosaic-style photo book
Landscape, nature and travel photographer Lizzie Shepherd proposes an iPhone book project
The camera on my iPhone 6S smartphone has become an invaluable part of my photographic kit. Aside from its role in enabling me to react spontaneously to a scene or a moment in time, I also love its native 4:3 and 1:1 crop formats and the incredible depth of field from its tiny sensor. It’s also a brilliant device for demonstrating ideas and compositions during workshops.
It’s all very well having a massive catalogue of smartphone images, but what can we do with them? I’m a big advocate of the printed image so, when I heard about Mosaic photo books, I hoped I’d found the perfect answer. The Mosaic app allows you to choose, organise and upload 20 images from your phone or tablet. Four days later, you will receive a beautifully crafted and presented 7x7-inch hardback book, with pictures arranged on the front cover like mosaic tiles.
I’ve made two books to date, using Snapseed to process the images on my phone first, and even creating quadtychs with the PhotoSplit app – continuing the tiled look from the front cover into the inside pages.
The first book I made was a trial run, but it allowed me to refine my plans for my second – in particular thinking more about the series of images
I wanted to use, and also refining the processing and border style.
Bear in mind that your phone screen isn’t colour-managed, so it’s likely to show the images brighter than they will appear in print. To overcome this, you could try creating a trial print or two at home first, and playing around with sequencing options on a larger screen before creating your order in the app.
Content is king and it really is worth spending time working out your theme and how best to present your images. There are limited text options within the Mosaic app (other services may be better if you’d prefer a lot of text alongside your image) so I created my own title page using Photoshop and uploaded this text as the first of my 20 images.
My next photo book will be playfully titled The Earth from the Air: all of the pictures in it are taken on my phone within a few feet of the ground, but often giving the illusion of a larger-scale aerial photograph.