Some Fractals in Black and White

This post was penciled-in to be about my first  explorations with infrared (IR) photography.  I was hoping that along with some outdoor images,   that I would have progressed far enough to show the results of  experiments done on trying to use IR to read some of the faded writing on an old field collection tag.  No luck so far,  but I’m looking into two other ways of doing things.  My camera is very good at blocking IR radiation in its unconverted form so anything I try takes quite a large amount of light and LONG exposure times.  The two or three experimental shots that sort of worked looking out at partly cloudy skies used exposures in the 8-12 minute range. This doesn’t bother me much (I’m actually having a ball thinking up things to try),  except that one must get used to a quite shocking amount of the technicolor snow that is digital noise.  At any rate, it is for a future post.

I Brake for Fractals!

Today’s  post is of a handful of images that thwack some big red work-flow shutdown button in me.  My old graphite and pen-and-ink tastes agitate  for abandoning further alteration and sometimes they win; a black and white image, or nearly so, is saved to be rendered HUGE to disk to bring up detail.  I”m not really sure what, stylistically, triggers this, though, “I LIKE that,”  seems sufficient reason to ‘take a snapshot’.

Fractal Noir

I’ve noticed,  that the majority of pictures I keep in grayscale tend toward the edgy, or bleak.  Such as this Julia-based image that reminds me of some derelict structure that is coming apart and great sheets of metal are collapsing on and tearing apart from  each other.  It doesn’t take much for my mind to imagine hearing those ghastly creaking noises  that up the suspense inside damaged submarines in the movies.  This,  even though I have gone on to also make a color version of this one.  The color one is a work in progress that resembles some exotic blue crystal pocket in a cream/ochre siltstone  bedrock; not gloomy at all, yet this one has more impact on my sensibilities.

I can hardly wait to render this one to disk as a HUGE  file and find out what all the broken up spaces and the draping traceries develop into as the details become visible!

Other times, the image is not foreboding or ‘noir’ at all.  This image has a positive note to it.   It looks like some sort of protozoan quadrille going in some congenial environment in a petri  dish.

That’s quite a common thing while working with fractals, the “that reminds me of a..” or “that looks like…”  Fractals seem to resonate the way music does, in a very real sense, in the brain.  Maybe  we are looking at things that feel familiar because they underlie the structure of the place in which we find ourselves?  Fodder for a thought  ‘r two.

Lastly,  here is a detail from a larger image, rendered to disk at about one half of the target size I’d like to eventually use as a standard for fractal-based images (click on image to see at size).

If you are interested in information about the Mandelbrot set or other fractal types, there is a lot of interesting stuff in a page called (almost)the Mother of All Fractals:The Mandelbrot Set.  The page has images to help understand the ‘territory’ and to demonstrate how the Mandelbrot set is being discovered to tie into phenomena in the physical world.

And,  just for fun:

Here’s a little animation by Dave Makin (his copyrighted work) using Ultrafractal.

You can see his other animations under MakinMagicFractals on YouTube.

Cheers!

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