Dave and I did a little ‘pandemic’ project. Dave made a poster quite a while ago with a grid of Arizona wildflowers. He has mentioned several times to me that we should do a similar poster with pictures of birds from Boyce Thompson Arboretum (BTA). I decided to take him up on it.
We combined our photos, and I did the grunt work of creating the poster. I used the image processing software called GIMP (which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program), which is free, open source software. I used this project to learn more about how to use GIMP. It’s pretty complex, and not always intuitive, but it has a lot of capabilities. Layers and Channels and Paths – oh my!
There are 274 bird species reported at BTA, some of which are very rare. I have photos of 217 of those, and 53 actually taken at BTA. We decided on a poster with 88 squares (we initially made a 70 square poster, but decided to increase it to 88). So we chose 88 of the most commonly seen birds there. The photos aren’t necessarily taken at the arboretum; we chose the photo that worked best for the poster (e.g. showing identifying marks). But all the birds on the poster have been reported at BTA.
We will donate posters to BTA, and they will sell them in their gift shop. We may also put the poster on Red Bubble for people to download. If we do, I’ll update this post with the link.
I reduced the file size, and added a water mark, for the image below. You can hover your mouse over it to zoom in on individual birds, in order to see more detail. If you’re not using a mouse (e.g. on your phone) you can use your fingers to zoom in.
4 Comments
I love it. This is great.
This took a lot of time and effort. I’ll show this to Brice to see how many of these birds are indigenous to Kansas.
Cool, Joe! How big will the printed poster be?
I think we’ll print 12″ x 18″, and 20″ x 30″. The aspect ratio for the poster design is 1.5 (which is the height divided by the width), so any size that is 1.5 will work.