The Average of All Photos One Man Shot in One Year

Photography enthusiast Sterling Parker created this abstract image by averaging all the photographs he shot in 2007. He tells us,

I have my photos arranged by month, and starting in January 2007, I imported all those photos into GIMP (the freeware image editor) as layers, adjusted the whole canvas to be as big as the largest dimension, then used a custom script to “average” all the layers so each one is an equal relative percentage of the whole. The white background is empty space around photos obviously, and you can see that I took more pictures in landscape than portrait.

After doing that for each month, I averaged all the months together (about 8 months total because I didn’t take pictures some months of that year) and then averaged all the months together. Overall, I’d say this is an average of about 350 photos.

It’s interesting how the image reveals both his preferences for portrait/landscape orientation and also his different camera resolutions.

Image credit: Photograph by Sterling Parker and used with permission