Posts Tagged spirals

Fractal Gallery 34

Time to post a new gallery. Lots of images done in Fractint this time. I’m getting this strange fatal error from  the Nextgen gallery, but it seems that it’s still working.

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Fractal Gallery 33

A lot of reworked images this time, and also a lot of spirals. It also features probably the longest render I ever did (the first image, took about 90 hours), considering the rendering time of images meant to be just displayed and not printed, these usually are much bigger and take some time but not that much I think. And it was not even worth it.

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The Rule of Thirds and the Golden Ratio

While doing some tweaks in old images I noticed that some images don’t really fit that well if just centered, mostly some spirals and images that have a certain detail that is the main “subject” of the image. If they are just moved a few bits to the side, they look more interesting. I’ve figured this by myself I guess since I never had any formal art training, and my older images seem to suffer more from this “problem”. It seems that I just did the fractal image and wherever it started, it stayed, I never tried to make it look better in terms of proportions or positioning. A small rotation the most, and that was it. But why this happens to the images? Why some appear to look better if their subjects are in certain places, mostly off-center? It can be sort of explained by the Rule of Thirds and also by the Golden Ratio.

The Rule of Thirds is well known in the photography world, and it’s not exactly a rule that you must follow all the time, it’s more like a guideline (same applies to the Golden Ratio). It says that your main subject(s) of your pictures/paintings etc. will look better if they are located 1/3 away from the image’s edges (I’d prefer to say though that the images might look better instead of will look better). It’s not a must follow rule, but it helps in some particular images.

And how do I know where is this specific location? Read the rest of this entry »

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Fractal Gallery 32

Just one image rescued from the past, the rest is all new. The kaleidofun image was really already posted, so it was replaced with a new image. The image called “fighting for food” was already posted as well, so it was replaced with another image, that has that same interesting moving effect as the “it’s alive” image.

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The chosen ones, pt. 1

As mentioned, i’ll try to pick some images I like from the galleries and talk a bit about them (it will not be a tutorial on how to do something similar!). I’ll try to follow the order of the galleries, just to avoid forgetting something. This will not be some sort of “my best images” series, I’ll be picking images that are between my favourites not only for their appearance, but sometimes due to another reason.

Galleries 1 & 2 don’t really have any special images. Gallery 3 has one that is worth mentioning, “Oh so pretty”.

It was originally made in Fractint, and imported into UltraFractal for rendering, rendering in 256 colours only wouldn’t make it look as smooth as it is. The original colours were different I think.

This kind of image is always a favourite. Whenever I get some repetitive pattern, be it with a full “theme” being repeated (in this case, the spiral) or lots of different things (re)appearing here and there, it always gets my attention. Add a bit of symmetry to this repetition, and there you go.

I have noticed that it’s a bit more “easy” (faster?) to get this kind of image in Fractint, when you are like me and haven’t memorized what every formula or parameter does by heart. Serendipity at its best. If you’re just exploring with some new stuff without any planning, sometimes these lovely images appear unpexpectedly. I have since learned ways to get something more specific if I need too – I’ve learned that the “Barnsley” formulas for example are good for symmetrical stuff (this image probably is one of them) – but sometimes a bit of pure luck while in unknown territories is still the best part of this game.

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