Fractal fun: coloring changes

While working on fractals in Fractint it was easy to fall into the habit of making color gradients for my palettes that mimicked metallic surfaces. Without the added flexibility of the tools now available,  most of my fractal play was in the nature of ‘taking portraits’ or ‘macro-photographs’ of structure that was either striking or, as so often happens, reminded me of something. Eventually all that shiny surface gets kind of same-y and it’s time to consider some changes. In my last post, I put up a few fractals that were more or less monochromatic. For the images of this post,  the palette was designed to look as if the fractals  were done in colored pencil. By altering the gradient so that its peak color was white (instead of peaking at an intense shade of the color to create the illusion of highlights on a metal  surface), and by limiting the colors to a main hue shading to white and adding a solid black for “drawing within the line”,  the palette’s effect is pretty close to colored pencil shading.

Thus,  bright, shiny images …

.get a different look.

As you can see in the next images, the limited number of colors in the palette  for Fractint doesn’t  work very well when the pixel values of the iterations (each time the formula is altered then solved for all solutions within the range and by the parameters being explored) don’t change enough to avoid ending up with bands of color rather than a smooth gradient.  Sometimes, the banding that results can be used to effect in an image, but usually one wishes the gradient were smooth instead.

Coloring the same fractal with different color palettes is par for the course, as one looks for the best way to enhance the structure that interested the eye.  With bilaterally and radially symmetrical fractals, this allows us to play with Paint Shop Pro, or some such, to assemble an image with different versions of the same fractal, for fun.  With Ultrafractal,   this is possible using the various tools within the program,  in concert with special formulae  that writers have given to the  public collection for all of us to use.

Using Fractint and Paint Shop Pro;  the last is a sort of vertical diptych:

(click on images in this post to view larger versions}

Messing about with the coloring can get you out of a rut. If everything one’s filing away looks like metal,  maybe it’s time to try to make it look like plastic or a painted surface.  Or even an organic object of some Nature not quite our own.

Radiating metallic  efflorescence.

Change things and get a high contrast image..

This one grew on me, eventually. though, I still call it the ‘organized liver’ when no one is within earshot.

Study the way light bounces off of things.  Does the brightest highlight still exhibit a shade of the color of the surface or is it a straight reflection of the temperature of the light source?  Does the highlight flare out over the surface or does it stay tight to the shape of the ilight source? Watching for characteristics of surfaces is a great aid to increased flexibility in choosing how to best exhibit whatever structure the math reveals while you explore the literally infinite world of fractals.

Cheers!

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!

.

Picking Up My Fractals…

…From where I left off.

Hallo, welcome to the sputtering refiring of my blog engine.  I would like to offer an apology to those who came to look at my blog, only to find nothing new.  I should have posted some form of “Out of the office” notice or other; I’m sorry.  Medical issues: a surgical visual repair that was undertaken did not have the expected result.  It will be at issue for some time to come so I will be trusting to luck that I don’t just post blurs! You will let me know in the comments, won’t you, please?

Before taking Janet Parke’s Ultrafractal (UF) class, I allowed as to how I would likely be posting some of my homework images here, well, here we go!

I haven’t the experience nor sufficient computing power to ‘go crazy’; so my stuff is from the UF shallow end.  The insufficient computing power can be frustrating even when keeping things simple because, fractals having infinite detail, the clunky fragments that detract from an image generated as a small picture can be hiding some beautiful details and textures. Here’s an example.

This image was rendered small and the details have turned into a distracting mess. The portion in the red box is detailed below from a much larger, and lengthier, rendering.

The detail:

As you can see, the detail is there once you throw enough pixels at it.  UF allows huge renders to disk; the limitations are really what your machine can handle and how long you can bear not working on more images, while waiting for a large render to calculate.  Since the machine I use for UF is shared, I cannot simply dump all the other programs taking up space,  and that computer uses RAM for video tasks,  so with those considerations, not much RAM is generally available. My current big,  straight-to-disk render has a little over two hours of calculating time to go, if rendered straight through.  My wimp-grade computer alerts to overheating after an average of one and a half minutes. If I pause and let the machine cool for about ten minutes I can keep going; a minute and a half plus ten minutes cooling per shot. Suddenly, two hours gets very, very long, lessee, 120 minutes x 10 minutes cooling is 1200 minutes…etc. Can’t wait to upgrade my computer.

The same sort of improvement can be seen with this pair, where besides messing up the smaller spirals in the space off of the main structure, the small render has pretty much made visual hash of the patterns on the ‘copper’ segments:

and

Large renders-to-disk are, in this tyro’s opinion, the Way To Go.

Tweaking things a bit

Some users of fractal software are really only interested in seeing to what form the actual mathematics plot. They are not interested in ‘tidying up’ or ‘improving’ the image,  beyond using coloring algorithms to help keep track of how the iterations are behaving.  I used to lean a bit toward that until I had my breath taken away by some of the ‘fractal-based‘ artworks that started showing up in the Fractal-Art Contests.  I’m hooked!

Back to my homework results.  In my virtual attic, where I’ve stored away the concept of making a sort of museum of Fractint images I’ve made, a whole subsection is of images that look like sculptures constructed of cut card or paper. Without the benefit of layers, that is how they will form, it’s the math.  Using layers, one can alter the image and make something with a more organic texture or ‘feel’ to its appearance.

from paper structure to something carved?

I’d imagine there is a way to manipulate interestingly with averaged layers of color as well, but I’ve tried only once with indifferent results.

Sometimes, to my mind, tweaking isn’t generally wise.  If you like all 68 different ways that you’ve tweaked something it’s hard to know which to concentrate on to work to fuller development of the image. You can take up a lot of memory with whole collections of fractals that vary only by an aspect or two of their make-up.

I’m sure you can see the similarities; one was an assigment, the other was its start. I find the former pretty, while the latter makes me think about how rootbound in technology we seem to be getting. ::shudder::

With all of the possibilities presented by the forms of the math and the creativity of the formula writers, who so generously contribute their work to the public collection for folks to use, you get a whole range of results. Some remind you a lot of things in the physical world, some lend themselves to just working with graphic design and others are just..in the realm of numerically-inspired fantasy.

Messing with shapes and colors:

A more organic look, near-flowers are fun to work with:

This was a surprise..a little cave; a work in progress at this point. For those new to fractals, one of the properties of fractals is self-similarity in structure, that is, you can find very similar structures at all levels of size scale. You can see this in this image by finding the little cave, quite similar, but over on its right side,  roughly an inch up from the bottom and a half-inch in from the right side (as you face the image: your right).

I have a lot of fun putting spheres into things, haven’t quite got down getting them as well defined as I’d like but I do like them:

One of the things we learned to do in UF was use a couple of special formulas to manipulate areas of the resulting image. You can directly select areas to help achieve a design, such as the Mondrian-inspired images of divided ‘canvases’ with fractal focal points by Kerry Mitchell.  At this starting level, however, this tool in UF comes in handy as a way to make mat surrounds and frames for images, right in the parameters of the picture.

I hope this has given you some small cross-section of an inkling of an idea about fractal-based art. If you are interested in trying your hand at UF,  I can’t recommend anything better but that you get hold of Janet Parke’s lessons.  Although she has retired from teaching them, they are superbly laid-out lessons, now available as e-books, and will give you the organized approach that will cut out untold volumes of time in developing a workflow that you can use to continue your own foray into the fascinating, and addictive, explorations in fractal art.

Cheers!

Thinkin’ Spring

Oh…the weather outside’s disgusting,

I can hear my knee-joints rusting,

so it’s here inside I’ll grumpily remain,

let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.

With apologies to Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne for fiddling with their classic.

I’m staring out the window at a medium waterfall that earlier was the downspout-less end of the  eaves trough.  It’s overflowing.  The narcissus and daffodils in front and in back of the house resemble a lost colony of colorful morning-after fraternity row students, crashed face down all over the yard where an overindulgence of rain has left them ’til they dry out a bit.  The last few days of seeing them up and alert seemed to promise a return to getting out into the yard with a camera.  Meanwhile, I’m thinking drab little scattered thoughts, as disciplined as a herd of cats, so I am going to post some spring-like pictures, photographic and fractographic, to keep my anticipation going, although some of these need to be re-taken using  better eyes.

Translucent petals on flowers alway make me want to saturate an image with their color. To that end, closeups taken from in front of (in some cases inside of) the flower with the sun or a pair of flashes lighting it from behind, can bring out shades not seen in reflected light shots.

Don’t Let it Get your Goad

I take some delight in dreaming up different shapes or sounds of things, art or artifact, that I think  could be brought into the world, based upon that quiet goading from whatever muse is lurking today.  Plenty of others do too,  just look at all the marvelous art, writings,  and handcrafted items on blogs around here! The fact that folks *have* something to put up brings me back, somewhat ashamedly, to the little pokes and prods from the imagination that I allow to just fall away, usually feeling inadequate in skills to the vision, or else too  busy to get beyond putting aside materials for later.

I’ve been more focused on this since the other day, when I read a question on the blog “Over Coffee…” that hit a little close to home. In her blog post, Does our Imagination Inspire Us to Act? Barb Hartsook pondered, “If I don’t act on the imagined, what have I achieved?”

Ulp.  I’d have to say, in my case,  not much more than stored raw materials.

While trying to come up with a post a couple of weeks ago, I had half an ear cocked to an argument on television between financial analysts on what needs to be done to bring the banking system back to health. The phrase that caught my attention was “taking away the toxic assets from Wall Street…” 

Photographs, fractographs?

Hi, fellow bloggic nomads!
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the similarities I see in how I approach the workflows of photography and fractal art.  Exploring fractals does have a different challenge for me: I keep finding weird stuff in the fractals.  While other folks are stumbling across structures that they then build into the breath-taking pieces that lead to audible “wow”s, I stumble upon the odd, weird and not-particularly-pretty with some regularity. Maybe  it’s a quantum-level “the observer affects the outcome” thing, but I suppose it could be called “not understanding the math and trying outrageous numbers,” too. *grin*
Or, I could be projecting, finding what is floating around half-submerged in my thoughts.

For example, at one point in the late 80s, we rescued and gave away more than thirty-five rabbits born of two does and a buck rabbit that some one had dumped nearby. We kept and raised 14 that were medically challenged. As a result, I had rabbits in my thoughts for roughly a decade by the time the last one passed away.  A couple years later,  I downloaded Fractint and that’s when odd things started showing up, from the fractals.   [Inserting tongue in cheek and putting on record of the Twilight Zone theme]   I submit here, for your approval,  a few pairs of cross-dimensional similarities.

Hershey, a fourth generation from our original dump-ee’s, sitting on the neighbors’ woodpile.  Next to Hershey is a fractal spiral that, explored with much zooming in, changing parameters and altering how it was colored, gave me a rabbit on a rock ledge to the side of the opening of a rocky warren.

Fractal post: Iterative Images

Hi Everyone, in today’s entry, fractal images take the stage. To oversimplify, fractals are the patterns formed by solution sets of certain types of equations. The solution sets have distinct properties, such as self-similarity and infinite detail; no matter how you may magnify or shrink the values you will find stucture that looks similar to every other scale, and there is always more detail to be had.  The equations’ parameters alter as one or more variables are incremented in some fashion as thousands, millions, or greater multiples of solution coordinates are generated.

A coloring variation of a Julia fractal

(Using Fractint)

When I started exploring fractals, making an image was a process where similarities to photography were more obvious. I bought a little program that was advertised in the back of a science magazine. It came on a single floppy disk and used the state of the art EGA monitor we had. The IBM  AT’s massive 2  (two) *grin* megabytes of RAM was plenty of memory. The images that resulted were 16-color banded snapshots.  You’d alter the parameters of an equation,  assign your 16-color palette using a coloring algorithm and save the file. It was a lot of fun, but soon business took precedence, and I had no time to mess with it in any concentrated way. In a couple of years, the AT had died and we had no computer access for a number of years. The next time we did, it was *capable of going online* and I found the Fractint and fractal-art mailing lists. *Big Smile, happy me*.