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!

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!

.

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!

]]> http://pingingmyglass.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/picking-up-my-fractals/feed/ 16 Pete pms010a detail01 gauss_mandel_pmsdet detail02 parametricavg3 final_image_2_pms potbound_pms colorpencil_pms final_image_extra_pms rockgardn lightninggenerator_pms rectangle_border_pms http://pingingmyglass.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/seasons-greetings-from-limbo/ http://pingingmyglass.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/seasons-greetings-from-limbo/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:21:27 +0000 Pete http://pingingmyglass.wordpress.com/?p=814 ]]> I just wanted to wish anyone who happens upon this page a memorable, warm and happy Christmas and New Year time!

Thanks to the writers out there who’ve shared so many interesting articles and thanks to the artists of all stripes who keep the web an interesting place in which to wander!

All the best to you all in the New Year ahead!

A letter to the Flamenco-playing kid in the glasses…

Hey Kid*,

I’ve been asked to give myse…er, you something of a short head’s up on a couple of things to incorporate into your assemblage of philosophical and intellectual tools.  I will Capitalize and Bold them.  With judicious application, they should set you up for a decent swing at the few strikes that you get in your scientifically expanding three-score-and-ten.  I misse…er, you don’t seem to be headed in the directions that will expand your opportunities as you become decrepit like y…er, I have, so here is a little list. Write these down in that gray plaid notebook where you’ve filled in each square with pencil-drawn ideas for paintings, yeah, the one with the poetry for Juli K H on the black inside the cover; oh, and as a side note, paint more than one of those, will ya? Y…er, I’m gonna like the way the one you do turns out, even if you didn’t.

The first thing I want to go ba…er, for you to do is to Attend Social Functions where you are not part of the choir, band, crew, cast, etc. although parties after any such event held by those organizations will do.  Do not, I repeat, do not go or stay within two feet of a wall or doorway unless you are passing through the door. If all you risk is your own pride, Take Social Risks. Do not risk the pride or reputation of others, that is their own option. Smile when you meet people and ask their name.  Practice taking “not interested in talking to you right now” as something that happens,  like dropping your napkin; There are Other People and Other Times, you Just Keep On.   Move to another area and try again.

Plan, (yes the evil P word) Trips to Places That You Want to See/Experience, whether or not you can get anyone else to go.  Do this as often as possible; you never know when that possibility might >poof< vanish overnight.

About maintenance: you know those Lists you hate?  The ones that you have to uncrumple from that little wad when you discover that you’re not actually going to get to spend any time at the summer recreation program,  seeing anyone from school? Here’s another approach.  Take a look at the tasks on the list. Aside from the bi-quarterly moving of the firewood pile, those are all things that build up because no one is assigned to do them as ongoing chores.  If you keep your eyes open and tackle a couple of the less enormous ones for a half-hour or so each day or every other day, you will find they never become major “everything on this list has to be done before school starts in three months” items on The Lists.  Break the Task Down into Manageable Parts. You’ll wonder how it was things didn’t get done before.

I have to get going, so as a general rule for all of the interests you may develop, and you’ve heard this once from Granddad, but I see it didn’t sink in, Take the Risk of Failure, particularly in areas in which you have the most creative ideas. If this  means entrepreneurship, so be it. Find a teacher, find a mentor, but find out what you need to know to make an idea fly and risk making a buck, most people see the point in making money.  And if you fail, Study Failure Until it’s Understood, and Forgive Yourself Your Mistakes. Then, you Just Keep On again.

Oh,  just one more thing,  no matter where you are, or what you’re doing, Be There In the Ongoing Moment with all your might.  Keep your …focus.

Be happy kid,  I hope these are useful to you,

Cheers,

A friend

* we were never all that close

Then came the early morning sightings out the kitchen window.  Preparing food in the kitchen for the morning feedings, checking out the window to see how low the finch’s thistle-seed feeder has gotten since the day before, when,  just outside the front door and  down between the retaining walls where the violets used to grow, a long neck and large head move cautiously forward, revealing a fairly large feathered  torso on stilts,  across onto the left-hand neighbor’s front yard.  Up along the edge of the hedge, followed openly, about four feet back,  by the right-hand neighbor’s petite tabby cat, who looks frankly astonished. Which look changes, once she sees us looking out at her, to something like “I could take that, ” as she comes back to our front walk.  The turkey, like a magic trick, vanished in the short time we were watching the cat.

We saw it a couple of times in the next few days, strutting from the right-hand neighbors, across the open cul-de-sac and up the driveway du jour to vanish into thin air, somehow, when it reached a house.  Then it seemed to have gone from the neighborhood.

Until this afternoon, gquowp….gquowp…gquowp..mumbling a couple of feet to the left of the backyard glass door.  Still looking for other turkeys, I guess. I went and got the camera, hoping to get a good shot, but when I returned it had, yes, vanished, so I hurried out the front door to catch it coming down the side driveway. Peeked around the corner: nothing.  Went all the way around the house the other way: nothing. Then, faintly, gquowp! Gquowp…gquowp.  I went back around front, looked ’round the yard and found nothing.  Gquowp-gquowp-gquowp-gquowp-gquowp!  Oh, the sound was from something taller than I am, and there was the turkey, on the ridge of the garage, neck extended, calling and looking for other turkeys. I took a couple of shots, until it seemed uneasy. I backed away onto the porch, checked exposures quickly and went back, hoping for a closer shot or a preening or wings-extended shot. No turkey on the roof, but there it was, at the bottom of the front garden walking up across the neighbor’s lawn, on its way to vanishing again.   If I didn’t know better,  I’d swear the thing teleports!

I hope I get some more tries, it’s a tricky critter!

Has the early spring brought you new visitors this year?

Cheers,

pete

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.

Bright direct light may help penetrate translucent flowers, but it’s hard, flat quality is not really very attractive, as can be seen on this skipper having a midafternoon snack on some dwarf asters.  The light is unflattering on the flower and creates such contrast that the relatively middle-toned brown of the butterfly, lit from the other side, looks much darker than it actually is.

Early morning and late afternoon light ‘rules’, in photographs.  Being down in a valley between two ranges of coastal hills, we don’t get as much of a chance at the rich tones of early evening sunlight as I’d like.  When the sun is rolling downslope to retire it has to find gaps in the hills, and in rooftops and dense small trees, to have the tones of ‘sweet light’, golds, peaches, pinks, reds and purples, pervade the front yard and add warmth to photographs, such as this spotlighted miniature rose.

Picture taking has become  somewhat more difficult for me during the best time of the morning for light. Since I’ve taken over the feeding of the outside critters, I have to wash the various oils and residues off  of my hands before handling anything, and the skittish eaters outside will abandon ship if I come back out after going in to wash and fetch gear.  That’s one advantage of having the good old ‘fractal camera’ on the desk.  A walk through the fractal garden is virtually limitless exploration.  Depending on one’s choices,  you may find something that leads to the forming of a blossom, such as this multilayered spiral…

or, some other structure out there in the mathematics might allow you to tweak a spiral with formulae that alter form, and a palette customized for what you feel like applying to what you found, giving you an imaginary nibble on some variety of what seems to be a broadleaf cousin of the blueberry.

Mmmm, blueberries.  Goodies from the garden, bounty of the raised bed.

To get a close-up, or do “macro” work in  the fractal math world, you can “zoom in” or “zoom out” mathematically.  In fact, the ability to expand the math of the default size fractal is so great that an equivalent  would be expanding the area of the fractal on your screen to several times the size of the known universe.  It takes a very long time to calculate at that depth, though.

For garden things in the real world, a macro lens can help explore things that are familiar in ways that make what you see a little unexpected. Even just getting to life-size on your camera’s sensor,  allows a much more detailed, up close and personal adventure.  Getting a bug’s-eye view of the world can be pretty interesting.  Sometimes, because of the characteristics of optics, you see structure not immediately apparent to the normal viewpoint. This salsify blossom, when you hold it up and look at it, sort of resembles a giant dandelion. Taken with a macro lens and natural lighting, limiting your depth of field, gives you a  cross section of the framework (The same thing happens if you try to photograph a dandelion with a small depth of field).  If you look closely at this salsify seed-head (click to see larger), you can see the tiny fibers that  hold the radiating ribs of the seeds’ parachutes. Cool, eh?

I miss having salsify in the yard, both for the photographic fun and for the delicious roots, although the plant parts are a skin irritant. Sauteed with butter, the roots  are a delicate oyster flavor; leading to the common name of ‘oyster plant’.

It’s fun to think of the Spring to come and the [at last!] reloading of fractal software with which to fiddle.

However, it’s still raining. The eaves are still a waterfall and the Big Fish in the other room needs its tank netted out, so I’ll get to work and try to wait as patiently as this little fella on the central California coast.

Waiting out the rain,

Cheers,

pete

I had a particular photograph in mind to enter into that contest.  It was one I took when my sister’s silver-tipped Persian was alive. He had just been bathed, and being a small kitty under all that fur, was peering over the rim of the tub with such a look of hurt and utter betrayal;  I took his picture from bathtub-rim height and it turned out quite well.  I didn’t find out that the only print was no longer here until after the contest’s closing date. (Lesson: make extra copies to file, ya never know). I’ll need a negative scanner, a real one, soon.

While looking for that picture I brought out more slides to scan, (please forgive the dreadful resolution in these scans, it’s as good as I can get out of this scanner)  as I’m trying to digitize my photo files, and came across a series of Dare, sitting in his carrier.  He loved his carrier, an ordinary particle board, wood and hardware cloth cat carrier, to go outside and remain in, lying  on its side with the door open on a small hill overlooking the humans in the vegetable garden, supervising double-digging, hexagonal layout interplanting and so forth.  Anyway, he was in the carrier in the front hall, at night, with the carrier door swung wide open and I thought it would make a good close-up; Dare looking out through the wires.

I turned off the room light, got down on the floor, put a flash well off the camera to my right and took great pains trying to see well enough, without any modeling light, to judge if his eyes and facial fur were sharp…really concentrating on the subject.  The first shot was taken with the door mostly closed

and was rather dark, even for the “abandoned kitty in a cage” look.  I liked the possibilities and decided to use a little more film on the idea.

To reflect a little bit more light into the carrier, I opened the door widely enough to position it to bounce flash in to Dare. With the room light still off, in the dark but for ambient light from way around a corner in another room, I got back down below the rim of the carrier and carefully strained my vision, to focus on eyes and fur again (with the lens closed down to get good depth of field it was VERY dark in the viewfinder), and took the shot.

At this point I’d like to emphasize something for all the photographers out there who fall in love with the subject in the viewfinder: always…always, always check everywhere in your viewfinder when you compose a scene,  especially if you’re in darkness.  I know it’s a beginner’s concept but it bears repeating, or, in my case, tattooing inside my eyelids. I know I’m not the only one with unicorns made of a subject plus a stick, a sign, or a lamppost unnoticed in the background.  I, for example, had never paid much attention to anything but the function of the cat carrier and in the dark, thought nothing of bouncing light off the inside of the door, which I’d never really examined…it’s just particle board, after all.

Well, with this bounced-flash shot, I discovered the manufacturer’s mark for the first time. Sigh.

Check those viewfinders!  *Grin*

Is it possible that this is the first post of the Out-take blog? *laughing*

What have you found in your viewfinder, lately?

Cheers,

pete

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…”  Our congress sees the toxic assets as impenetrably complex paper instruments of bundled, currently unquantifiable debt. My mind sees a pen-and-ink cartoon of a dour-looking group of investment-bank executives being led, by serious men in guard uniforms, onto waiting buses marked, “Camp Fed”; the  drawing captioned, “taking away Wall Street’s Toxic Assets”.

Aha! Goading from a muse! >Poke, poke<…“Do this, it’ll be fun!” >Prod, prod<…

My response: “That’d be fun; I’d like to see that” mumbled to myself, and on I go with whatever I’d been doing. I told family about the image that’d popped up and they said, “you should do that!”  To which I hemmed and hawed, and said “someone who can draw, now, should do that. Besides, someone might get really offended.”   Yet, I have pens, pencils, brushes, ink, paper and, given two or three days warning, a small desk I could clear, without resorting to explosives, to have a flat surface.  I hope this doesn’t mean I’m just collecting art supplies, but it happens all the time, doesn’t it?

To wit:
• Whistling…>poke< …hm, nice tune…do I go to the piano, work it out and write it down? Not any more.
• Rolling words around in the mouth because you like the feel of them and the rhythm the syllables make…>poke< Hm…a good lyric.  Does it go into a notebook?  That notebook is put away.
• Working on this post brought the design for what I think would make a charming ceramic tea kettle (Thanks Barb!).  Will I try to craft such a thing?

After this whinge about tossing the gifts of imagination to the wind to carry off, I’d like to think so.

How do you overcome your particular inertia?

At least, if I’m already absorbed in creative practice or play, the pokes and whispers of imagination within the task are heeded. Just for ducks, because the end result hss been posted here before,  here’s how looking for a fractal image for a contest went, long ago.
Okay, let’s start with this- -spiral thingy.

Hm. Let’s snazz up the color a bit…looks like structured pizza.

Naw,  that’s really not it. Let’s try red and gold shadings.

>poke Hey! Redraw with the upper right quadrant of the spiral to fill the frame! There’re faces!<

Hm, those look like faces. We’ll just use the frame to alter the width and skew it a bit.

>Poke, poke< It’s a demonic-looking clown, like a monster movie! >prod, poke<

Man, that’s one wei…

>Poke, poke poke…Look at the top, there are ears beside that crown-thing, a snout and a pair of strange curling things<

…rd clown-face. I’ll just record this thing to come back to and make a palette for mousy gray-brown and see what those ears and the snout do.  With any luck, it’ll be animal-like for the contest.

>Woohoo! It’s a bat, change colors and clean up the image to keep the spiral of bats!  Poke, poke<

I’ll be darned, I bet with broadening and  a few alterations to the palette that could be brought out more clearly   And what’s a bat with furled wings doing right side up? I’ll invert it. Of course, this keeps my record of finding weird while others are finding  beauty intact for the contest.

May you have better courage with your inspirations  than I!

Cheers!

pete

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.

Next:

To reach even further out into the “Pete finds weird fractals” exposition, here we have an ordinary fractal artist, fractaling away at a computer late into the night.  (Okay, there would normally be a room light on, it’s a portrait,  I’m taking license *grin*)    His  fractal counterpart seems to be intently peering at something, as we can see through this fractal keyhole.

I don’t really understand how it happens.  Maybe it’s a fluke of how I built my color palettes.  Where ever I go fractal exploring, the absurd seems to crop up.  Here is another reality/fractality pair:

On the left is an outtake  shot from a small study of eggs made for a class at LVS; a paw-print of eggs, and on the right a pretty fractal perhaps if found by someone else, but a basket of eggs to add to my file of fractal fossils, eggs, paper cut-outs, ring-spouting towers, internal body parts  and critters.  Speaking of critters…

In an earlier post, I related my lifelong interest in bugs, insects and butterflies/moths.  I watch for butterflies, always keeping an eye out for a visit from one of the varieties we had in the yard for years, until the area started being built up.

These swallowtails are in the wet iron-and- lithium-salts-laden sands, near a natural lithium-laced spring, beside the river near my grandparents’ cabin.

On the right is a flight of fractal butterflies…never wavering from their flight formation.

Lastly for this post [fade out Twilight Zone music....fade in Night Gallery music] is a spooky li’l thang, that appeared from neophyte me playing with Atriatix, not really understanding it.   Not something I expected to see, and with a certain level of spookiness to it, but a very interesting image, nonetheless.

On the left here is my only cooperative model for camera classes, in a snazzy tam, posing to demonstrate filling in light on *his* right side with a reflector. To the right in the post is the spookiest fractal I’ve run across in my explorations. It’s an interesting one , the way you can move around the circle to find seven skulls, moving one eye’s orbit at a time.

Well, [fade out Night Gallery music...remove tongue from cheek]  that’s the post.  I had fun looking for pictures to go with the oddities from the math and, if it’s all right with you, I’ll revisit this in the future, when I have more pictures of the real world to go along with more of the weird fractals.

Cheers, take care of each other ‘out there’!

pete