I didn't want to do this task until I could discover a unique approach, since so many people had used paint as their medium so far, even though instructions indicate that any medium or style is acceptable. Ultimately I hit on the concept of making a photo-mosaic of a player portrait, using player portraits as the cell images. The resulting image would be the ultimate meta-portrait, a portrait of all players. And what better way to reflect this than by using K!'s photograph of the Earth?



I was inspired to do this when I saw Burn Unit's tiny portraits. I imagined that by reducing the size of individual portraits down further, one could easily incorporate more and more player portraits on to one page, which would form an increasingly detailed composite image. By following this concept to the extreme, reductio ad absurdum, I arrived at the inspiration for this completion.

When I copied these images, ending at 9:00 PM CST on 1/2/08, there were 1,517 players in SF0. To gather the raw material, I used DownThemAll to scrape the (conveniently square) portraits from all 64 player pages. Once this was done, I processed the images through a mosaic creator to create the final result.

I had never created a photo mosaic before, so it took longer than I expected to achieve the desired effect. I wanted to ensure that every portrait was incorporated, without making the mosaic look shoddy. I ultimately used a total cell count of 7,920 to create the image up top. It's big. Unfortunately I do not believe that it is not complete.

After way too many hours of trying different programs and banging my head against the wall on this project, I could not manage to fit every portrait in the montage without causing weird effects (see second and third images for examples). I could submit it as-is--gambling on the slim chance that anyone would attempt to verify that every single photo is included--but that would feel false. I'm sure it's a limitation of the software. There must be a way to do it, I just don't have the means.

Therefore, I am seeking a collaborator to bring this task to its full completion. Please contact me if you are a master photo-mosaicist. Let's do this right.

In the meantime I have posted my attempts at this task. I did not accomplish what I set out to do, but I succeeded by degrees; I think the images that I did produce are beautiful in their own right. I hope you enjoy them.