A nice one. I’m still not familiar with the tricks of this stuff but when it works it makes some amazing images. This one is called “Almost Japanese”. It’s worth a post of its own instead of being buried inside a gallery that not everyone will see.
Almost Japanese
Sorry for the long time without any posts but this is not a daily job, is it? OK, enough rantings.
As I said in the previous post I tried the Mandala Project or something. I opened all my UPRs one by one (well not all yet) and applied a kaleidoscope transformation on each layer to create the mandala-like images. Some images work better than others, some images don’t work at all, some give birth to a lot of new images and so on.
For the creation process, I didn’t change any of the original image’s fractal parameters, I just applied the kaleidoscope on the layers and that was it. In very few cases, I did some extra zooming when I thought I could find something more interesting a little deeper, but this wasn’t the case with all images. Of course, lots of panning work was a must to find good images, but there are some images that are just the original image with the transformation without any panning, applied to the image with its original coordinates. Also, I made the “mandalas” in the same order as I made the original images, I started with my very first (saved) image, and went on from there. I’m not sure where I am at this point now (I have about 50 images already made), but I think I’ve tried at least a whole year of images or maybe half a year of UPRs. And this is… still 2002? I think so.
For me, it’s a bit easier to spot the original image that was transformed, but sometimes there aren’t much hints and the new image is a bit different, although it still can be recognizable maybe from its colour scheme. Some “mandalas” kept some parts (or visual characteristics) of the original images a bit intact, like mandelbrot shapes, etc. etc. and this was done on purpose sometimes.
This project is something I’m doing just for fun, while I don’t have enough new images to be added to new fractal galleries.
Here are the first gallery, with 15 images (I guess 16 will look better… maybe I’ll change that):
As some people with some a good attention span might have noticed, the watermark now shows “www.mundofractal.com”. I could grab this domain name and now you can use both the .net or the .com extensions. Hopefully Google won’t get pissed at me for redirecting a domain to this URL.
I read something about mandalas this week (Jung studied them, never heard of that before) and was wondering if I should make some. I am not an expert about them, have no idea about their meanings or if there are particular styles of mandalas, I am just doing something for fun. I’m not very fond of them, but not because they aren’t visually attractive. They are, sometimes, but as it’s so easy to make one from a fractal image within UF that I am not really interested. It’s too simple, although sometimes there are some very interesting images. At the same time, it’s a bit unpredictable if a good “mandala” will appear. I’m not sure if even these images can be called mandalas, if there’s some special characteristic that makes an image to be able to be called like that, just like the fractals (self-similarity etc. etc.).
I am picking all my saved fractals and applying the “mandala” trick on them – it’s the kaleidoscope transformation of UF, applied on every layer of the image – and if something interesting appears, I’m saving the image. It’s interesting how some very good fractals don’t give me any interesting mandala, and vice-versa. I’m keeeping mostly the default settings of the transformation, but sometimes I’m changing things a little bit. Also, I’m zooming in/out as needed. At first I thought it would be cheating, as I thought of making a mandala just with what the original image could give me, but why not change the rules a bit? Rules? Which rules?
Again, as soon as there are enough images for a gallery, they will be posted all at once, about 16 or 20 at a time. Maybe in a special section, who knows.
Descriptions on the images will be added later. It has way more images than planned, it will be fixed soon. Also there are some huge images this time. Whatever. One of these images has a cheating, I had to fix its contrast in Photoshop.
A day late, but happy 70th birthday. I wonder how things could have been gone musically if these 4 still had time and the chance to put aside their differences and at least for one more time bring us back to the time when music and rock’n’roll used to be fun. Anyway… here comes a fractal image that is related to this guy, his band, and obviously, the 60’s culture.
The first time The Beatles experienced LSD was sort of an accident. Or at least, it didn’t happen because they deliberately did or wanted it to happen. They were gathered for a tea in the evening at George dentist’s house, all the 4 guys and their wives plus the dentist and his wife. He slipped some LSD into their coffees… and the rest is history. This is probably one of the sugar cubes that were at the event:
Beatle Sugar Cube
“It was the Beatles’ first experience of the drug – one which made the small room of the flat in Strathearn Place ‘as big as the Albert Hall’ according to Cynthia and gave George the impression that he was ‘falling in love’ with everyone he met after later driving the group in his Mini to the Pickwick Club and Ad Lib, near Leicester Square.” (source)
