424 photos in the paper on one day. Mosaic by Grant M. Haller

Although I'm not much of a fan of blogs I thought it might be of interest to explain how I managed to get 424 photographs in the paper on one day.

In fact, I started with nearly 6,000 images from 10 days in Peoria, AZ.

Spring Training is much more than baseball players. It might be all the rain I was leaving behind here in Seattle, but I got a little carried away with all the sunshine and shadows. Included in the above mosaic are baseballs, shadows, fans, reporters, photographers, even a photo from a nearby museum. I had spent 10 days in the sun chasing baseball and the activity around the five fields the Mariners use.

My days started at 8 a.m. and I wouldn't finish transmitting my photos for the paper and the web until it was almost dark.

One evening, while walking through a Peoria book store I found Photoshop Creative, a British magazine, that talked about making photo mosaics. At the time I liked the concept but wasn't sure how I could use it for the paper. It wasn't until I returned to Seattle and looked through my rough edit that I figured I might be able to make a mosaic of my Spring Training photographs.

The process required taking a batch of photos, shrinking them down to 1.5 inches by .7 inches and then overlaying the semi-transparent image of Ichiro over a contact page of the smaller photos. Since I make images in a 35 mm format, the vertical and horizontal images would not fit together as easy as the square images used in the British magazine.

For the main image, I wanted one that would represent what I visualized as the key to the Mariners season. I searched through more than 6,000 images I had made in Peoria. I tried to work in the manager, tried to use a couple of photos of players laughing and having a good time. But a photo of Ichiro Suzuki I had made during "Photo Day", holding out his bat and looking right at me seemed to say it all.

With the help of the magazine's examples, Photoshop CS2 and a couple late-night sessions on my MacBook Pro laptop I constructed the image that was published as a poster in the newspaper on Opening Day.