Lightbending

I've been working on uploading fractals from 2002 to my gallery, and finding many that are full of rainbows. That must have been when I first started experimenting with my three-layer technique. I remember being all interested in atmospheric optics around that time, so probably that was what inspired me to try making pictures with that kind of look.

And it also reminded me that I've been meaning to write a page about how to put spectra into fractals, and now I have. I hope somebody out there may find it useful.

Here's a new fractal that I made while I was messing with some of the tutorial images.

Glass Rings

Old Favorites

The new fractal gallery is up and running, in a small way. If everything is working right, it won't look too enormously different than the old version, but the navigation and inner workings are substantially changed. Right now, what's in it are pictures from the first year and a half (or so) that I was making fractals. I have one or two small things to smooth out still, and then I'll be adding more pictures. So far I'm very pleased about how it's working; it's very easy to add new stuff. (And the stylesheets don't render properly in Internet Explorer 6! Of course! Bah phooey. No one should be using IE6 anymore anyway. This means you, Mom.)

It's been a little strange, going through all my archives of ancient fractals. I'm a little taken aback by the simplicity of color, the frequent clumsiness, the obvious lack of knowledge about the program. But at the same time, they have a kind of raw direct energy that seems good. And in some cases, I've been interested to see the beginnings of ideas that I now have spent many years developing in all sorts of directions. It's a sort of cross between archaeology and navel-gazing, and probably of no interest to anyone but myself.

This picture was made after I'd been using Ultra Fractal for less than a month, I think.

Chebyshev Avocado



Before UF, I'd spent a couple of months messing with Fractint, and the sharp-edged areas of bold color give the UF image a similar style.

So now I just have another eight years' worth of parameters to sort through, and decide what else to include. And a small amount of code still to tweak. I will probably need to make more tea.

How to shuffle the pictures

And then there's my poor neglected website, which I've been feeling guilty about since before I started my senior year at Cornish. All summer I've been telling myself I need to add some new stuff to it, and I keep putting it off and not doing it.

Eventually I realized that I'm not updating it because it's a complete drag to update: I have to gather together some small collection of maybe-related images, arrange them in some suitable order, write a new HTML page (or at least dump them into the template), update links, etc. I practically always post things on this weblog instead, because it's much simpler and requires less thought.

I started thinking, "What I need is a gallery that works more like the rest of the internet. It can be more interactive, more content-driven, it can have an interface that's more responsive to the user." And then I said "Ew, you're thinking like a horrible graphic-designer marketing wonk. Stop that."

What it really needs to be is fun to play with. If it's fun to play with, I'll play with it, and so will my prospective audience. I can scrape off the clinging shreds of my graphic-design training, stop thinking like a damned artist, and just make internet time-waster toys instead.

So I've been turning my fractal gallery into a thing you can play with. It's nearly done. Tonight it had a brief round of beta-testing I sent the test-link to my mom and she said it was wonderful. So it will probably go officially live pretty soon.

Hooray!

De-Rezzed

Hooray, I've got my gallery pages into enough shape that I think they'll do for a bit. I'm hoping to get some more stuff added before I go back to school, but at least there's something there now.

This morning I was thinking about how to make pictures that looked like they'd been Photoshop-filtered, but could be rendered at high resolution, for printing. I did some experiments, and was going to post about them here, but it turned into quite a long-winded thing with a lot of pictures, so I made a separate page for it. So now the world can read all about my filter forgery.

I started with this fractal:

A New Era


And mangled it half a dozen different ways. Are any of them any better than the original? I have no idea; I've been staring at them all for way too long, and have lost all sense of aesthetic judgment. I do think it's kind of entertaining that typing up my notes on the process seems to have taken at least twice as long as it took to make the experiments in the first place.