Every photograph you send becomes one tile in the finished portrait, so the number you send decides how much of their life is actually in it. Anywhere from a hundred to three hundred is the sweet spot — not a rule, just the range where the likeness comes out truest and the same picture stops having to do double duty.

Fewer is fine to start. If I need more to do them justice, I will simply ask before I begin — you will never open a portrait that is padded out with the same photograph over and over.

The single most useful thing you can do is spread your choices out: different years, different seasons, different rooms, different light. Asleep on the sofa, mid-run in long grass, the close-up where they are looking straight at you, the one taken from across the garden where they are barely more than a shape.

A mix of bright and dark photographs is genuinely worth having. The portrait is built out of the tones in your pictures, so a set with real range — snow and lamplight, midday and dusk — gives it depth, while two hundred photographs all taken in the same bright kitchen give it very little to work with.

In the finished portrait each photograph sits at roughly thumbnail size. At that scale a soft focus, a bit of grain or an awkward crop simply disappears — what survives is the colour and the light, which is exactly what the portrait is made of.

So the shot where they moved, the one taken through a rainy window, the one you have kept for years and never shown anyone: send them. Those are usually the photographs with the day still attached to them, and they cost nothing to include.

Straight from your camera roll is best — JPG, PNG or the HEIC files an iPhone makes are all fine, and there is no need to shrink or convert anything. What is worth avoiding, where you have the choice, is screenshots and images re-saved out of a messaging app: those have been squeezed down and reprinted twice already, so there is less of the original left.

That said, this is a preference and not a rule. If the only surviving copy of a photograph is a screenshot from an old phone, send the screenshot. A real memory beats a clean file every time.

If the pictures you want are prints in a box, you need no scanner and you need to send nothing anywhere. Photograph them with your phone: lay each print flat near a window in daylight, out of direct sun, and stand so your own shadow falls away from it. The daylight is the whole trick — a lamp overhead is what lays a bright patch across the middle of the picture.

One photograph per print, filling most of the frame. Crooked is fine, and so is a little of the table around the edges: straightening and cropping them is my work, not yours.

Step back from the finished piece and you see a single portrait of them; lean in and it dissolves into hundreds of your photographs. That single big picture comes from one of the photographs you send — so it is worth knowing what makes a good one.

The best candidates have their face clearly visible and in focus, reasonable light on it, and a little room around the head rather than a tight crop. A plain or uncluttered background helps but is far from essential.

You do not have to choose it yourself. If one photograph is obviously the one, tell me which in the message box when you order and I will work from it. If you would rather not decide, I will pick the one that carries them best.

Duplicates. Burst shots and near-identical frames are fine to send — repeats get thinned out, and the composition avoids putting the same picture next to itself.

Other faces. Photographs with people in them are welcome; they become tiles like everything else, and they are usually the ones you are most glad to find later.

Order and file names. Send them in whatever order they come off your phone. Nothing needs sorting, renaming or numbering.

Privacy. Your photographs are seen only by me, and they are used only to make your portrait.

When you are ready, add them all at once and I will take it from there.

Start your portrait →