On Average

Jason Salavon makes images by combining other images:

Begun independently in 1997, these works use the mean and median average from sets of photographs (also music & video) sharing common characteristics.

It's a simple technique, but produces interesting, painterly results. Do check out his work - it's fascinating.

Since I am an imaging geek, I thought I'd give it a try. So, I wrote a little program to do it... and here are my results:


100 Maple Leaves


66 Fireworks Snapshots


85 Balloons

The source images were collected from Google Image searches.

My results are a lot more abstract than his, and I assume that's because he's making a strong effort to use source images which are quite similar. I didn't try very hard to do that in the three images above. But for this next one, I cut down my collection of balloon images to only those which show a single hot-air balloon.


69 Balloons

The difference is obvious.

4 thoughts on “On Average

  1. felix culpa

    True cool.
    Uh, yeah; obvious.
    The skies are what really distinguish them. Love the shadings in the last.
    For some reason the first two make me think of Turner, the last two of Monet. Anyway they’s real real purty.

    Getting a lot of satisfaction from imaging myself lately, only with acrylic on canvas.

  2. Troy

    The source images for Jason Salavon’s amalgamations are surprisingly dissimilar. See the Fall 2004 issue (#15) of Cabinet magazine (http://www.cabinetmagazine.org) to see all 100 source images for two of the works in Salavon’s 100 Special Moments series.

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