Pixiq

As in so many things, mother nature got there first. It is certainly the case with mosaics and in the natural world you don't have to look far before you find examples of things built out of small elements (eg hairs and scales) to create the larger picture.

I was probably about seven years old when I put some of the 'dust' from a butterfly wing on a glass slide and looked at it through a microscope. I was enchanted by the tiny fan-like shapes and even more amazed when I read that Victorian microscopists had assembled these minute scales into pictures...one I saw once was of the nursery rhyme "Mary Mary Quite Contrary, how does your garden grow."  Wonderfully, painstakingly... pointless: they were clearly a race apart.

This 'dust' of wing scales from a "Death's Head Hawk", a large Sphinx moth, flying into a candle flame was thought to be a harbinger of death...albeit most probably for the moth. But talk about give a dog (or moth) a bad name: Acherontia atropos, the latin name comes from Acheron - one of five rivers (sometimes a lake) in Hades (hell). Atropos - one of the Fates: the really 'nice' lady who chose the mechanism of death for each human. 

The 'eye spots' and 'faces'  in the butterfly and moth world act as a defence mechanisms and are built up from these tiny scales.

Lichen Patterns

Winter and early spring are good times for going out in clean air in rocky places in mountains or near the sea to photograph the natural mosaics made by lichen specieson rocks. These ultra slow-growing plants are part fungus and part green plant that encrust rocks and ancient tree bark with their growth. Ancient walls and roof tiles are also great places to find lichen. I tend to go out on a clear day and photograph these things in late afternoon light where the low sun position provides side-lighting and makes them appear sharp by creating relief (nature's unsharp mask).

 Photographing Insect wing scales:

Moth and butterfly wing scales can be photographed on the living insect using a macro lens, particularly if you have obtained the caterpillars, let them feed up and emerge. Don't disturb the adult insect whilst those wings are drying for they are vulnerable and delicate. As soon as an insect such as a butterfly or moth takes to the wing it begins to shed these scales: for perfect results photograph the virgin insect. Sometimes, beneath spider webs you will find butterfly wings that can be photographed -- spiders go for the bodies and leave them to fall to the ground. If you go to a butterfly farm and do not mind appearing a bit 'odd' then ask if you can have any insect wings they might have swept up. If you approach butterflies at the beginning of the day (before they warm up) or at the end when sunning themselves, they tend to be less likely to fly off. With a little patience you quickly acquire the stalking skills necessary. 

PLEASE don't 'euthanase' butterflies and moths just to take pictures as some people suggest on the internet. You can do it better without and demonstrate your far superior photographic skills into the bargain. Killing stuff maybe what the Victorians did in the name of an 'interest in nature'... we should know better and to any responsible nature photographer it's closer to necrophilia.

The importance of patterns:

Digital up-scaling - understanding how it works

If we look closely at the tiny wings scales of butterflies or the parts that make up a lichen you see how they form patterns. The business of up-scaling with programs like Genuine Fractals operate in an ingenious way: the program recognizes shapes in the form of fractals. When up-scaling an image file it does so to preserve these shapes: squares, triangles, rectangles, circles, spirals and the like. The final prints, with these shapes preserved, can look incredibly sharp when viewed from a suitable distance. It is far more subtle than other forms of interpolation which essentially just add in more pixels. True, the interpolation algortihms do this cleverly with reference to neighboring pixels but with high degrees of enlargement this cannot preserve the shapes in the same way as a program such as Genuine Fractals (now Perfect Resize 7).

The compound eyes of flies, dragonflies, bees wasps and many other insects are a mosaic of heaxagonal facets, each of them a simple lens. Regular hexagons like triangles and 4-sided regular shapes such as squares, rectangles rhombuses etc, fill spaces without gaps (tessellate) like floor tiles and the sensor sites that make up the array on the sensor in your digital camera.

The cells on honeycombs in beehives and in wasps' nests are also mosaics of highly regular hexagonal cells that form both straight and curved shapes.

What a photographer can get out of mosaics

a. A good idea of how sharp your lens is

Mosaics in landscapes such as stones in walls bricks and so on provide an effective test for lenses. If you zoom in on these details in postproduction (100%, 200% and more) you can see just how effectively those details have been separated (resolved) by the lens.

Using Lighting direction to increase the impression of sharpness

The impression of sharpness is generally enhanced by a degree of side lighting and a good steady support (tripod, monopod, beanbag -- leaning against a pillar or wall): here the top of my camera back-pack for the shot of seashells on a beach.

View this link for the first part on MOSAICS