A blown glass sculpture of an East Asian dragon. Unlike European dragons, Asian dragons do not require wings to fly.
Passionate worship: a series of mosaics
These mosaics were created for the 2010 Annual Conference of the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church
There are 12 mosaics. Each mosaic is 21,071 pixels across and 15,803 pixels down (292.65 inches by 219.5 inches, 24 x 18 feet). Each mosaic has 10,240 photos in it, drawn from 2,545 photos submitted by churches in the Conference through May 14 (some photos are obviously repeated).
Each mosaic took roughly three hours to produce, mostly because it took several attempts to get the right balance of color and appearance. After finding the right look, it took an Apple Mac Pro roughly 10 minutes to produce one mosaic. Each mosaic was roughly 166 megabytes; collectively, they were 1.97 gigabytes. The samples linked from this page are the same area, but have been reduced to just 54 megabytes, on average.
If you blew up one of the full mosaics, this is what one 500 pixel by 500 pixel sample might look like:
Section of a mosaic enlarged to show individual photos.
For the conference, the mosaics were assembled into a movie that slowly panned across the photos and zoomed in and out. The finished movie, 1024 x 768 pixels, was 621.8 megabytes in size and ran for 39 minutes. Because of problems projecting the movie, only short clips were used in the conference.
Each small image below links to a page where you will see an image of the mosaic created from that photo, along with a link to the full-sized mosaic. Note that the full-size images are huge, and may crash your Web browser, or your computer, if you are not careful in downloading them. Right-click on the mosaic link to download the full-size mosaics; this will transfer them to your computer without attempting to display them in your Web browser.
Kinko's and other print services can, if you wish, print out the large mosaics on plastic or canvas banners.
United Methodist church offering open communion.
United Methodist parishioners contributing to a Habitat for Humanity project.
Playing with a parachute on the church lawn.
United Methodist 'Need Prayer?' table.
United Methodists united in prayer.
United Methodist infant baptism.
United Methodist immersion baptism.
Passionate worship, passionate prayer.
United Methodist baptism in the river.
United Methodists united in song and music.
United Methodist toddler baptism.
Children dancing under a peaceful sky with seagulls.
Lest you get the wrong idea, United Methodists do far more than dunk people in rivers (personally, I've never seen that) and sprinkle water on the heads of children. But this was an annual conference of church leaders, and the photographs were selected to appeal to that audience.
