Let's Adventure Together: Discover How This Patriotic Work of a Canadian Icon Was Created

 🇨🇦 I am Canadian 🇨🇦

I’m very blessed to have born here in this beautiful country.  Leading up to the big occasion of “Canada 150” I felt inspired to create an image in honour of my Country and I was not quite sure what I was going to come up with but with some prayer and a little time to contemplate ~ it came to me in small bits…

I was going to use my photographs together to form the Canadian Flag. A photo-mosaic if you will. Which I'll add, I had no previous experience with and this was the first ever attempt.

First I needed to photograph red and white the colours of the flag that weaves my Country together. I decided since the images were about the colour primarily, that I wanted more of an abstraction of the subject matter so macro photography would be best suited for this project.  With Abigail (my Canon 5D Mark II ) in hand, I ventured out on the hunt for some red and white.

I did not have to travel very far; my house is white, with a bright red door. I had all the makings right on my doorstep. However I did venture out around town because shooting images on my front porch just felt a little too easy. This goes to show my fellow shutterbugs … you do not have to venture to exotic places for inspiration or great images!

I found myself out on the main drag… and this building became my fascination. For hours of photographic fun I explored every angle and textured red & white surface.

It was quite remarkable the results I was getting. I had a hard time stopping my creative workflow. With several hundred images captured, how the final image would come together I was quite unsure, since this was my first ever attempt at a whole new area that I was exploring ~ the photo montage.

It was time to take to the computer.  After hours and hours of culling & processing I could not see how these odds and sods of beautifully crafted images were going to come together to form the Canadian flag. I was overwhelmed by analyzing the colour combos which resulted in feeling uncertain and unsettled with how this project was going to turn out.

I pressed on through the doubt and critical thoughts and decided it might be a better idea to let the images ‘rest’ while I tackle the project from the back end.

Switching gears, I  started constructing my grid. With grid in place, it was time to lay down colour to hold image placement. From there, deciding how many rows and columns to go with, what size the individual images would be and how would that translate when printed small (6×4) vs. large (36×24) how images would be used to fill the space.

Once that was formed, it started to fall into place … this image here, that one there… take a step back, review, rearrange, plug in some more.. until completion!

ET VOLIA!

I did it! It came together.. but was it complete? Was I satisfied? Could I do better? I liked this formation but it felt a little too obvious and safe to me, so I took a step back and the lightbulb went off! The creative juices were flowing!  SPACE is what this image needed to give it more of an artistic flair. Give a little form and let the imagination fill in the rest, which resulted in this version.

Nice, but still something was not making my soul sing… keeping with it, working it through ~ ahhhhh I had it! It needed some MOVEMENT!  You know like “A WAVING FLAG” and yes, the song was rattling ’round my brain as I was trying to figure out how to give this two dimensional image some movement and make it wave. It wasn’t long, and everything started to fall into place ~ I present to you the completed image:
(best viewed from a distance to get the effect)