Photography into Fractals

I love photography. I love making fractals. I was very happy when through software and a little ingenuity, I was able to combine the two! By mixing these to hobbies, I can create unique images that I feel are wholly mine.

I am going to display the combinations that I have made, and I will direct you to the places and tools you can learn to do this on your own, too. To do this it does require some intermediate level skills in both Photoshop (or a similar program) and a fractal generation program called Ultra Fractal. Still, I hope to inspire you to learn about the complex worlds of fractals and photography.

UPDATE 07/31/2014: I haven't done fractal art in a long time, but due to the popularity of this lens, I am keeping it up to encourage and inspire others to explore their own creativity in fractal art.

I took a photo of a bleeding hearts flower bunch and isolated one of them roughly in The GIMP. I saved the file as a .PNG so transparency is preserved. This is the base image I used for my fractal.

This is the final product I came up with using the image in Ultra Fractal.

This is the final product after I imported and manipulated the natural fractal into a digital one in the program Ultra Fractal.

I found the flamingos at the Philadelphia Zoo to be quite cool, and felt I needed to manipulate this photo of one into a fractal.

This spiky pink creation was the result of the manipulation of the flamingo.

This was one of my first attempts at combining fractals and photography. I used a similar photo for the photo in my introduction.

This is the final result with importing the lily photo into Ultra Fractal.

As I said before in my intro, you will need to be familiar with creating fractals in Ultra Fractal and manipulating images in photo editing software. Ultra Fractal is free to try, but does cost $60.00 to obtain a license. I will also direct you to some links to get you started in creating your own photo fractals. I suggest starting slowly.

To start, you will need an image with a crisp, clear focal point. Isolate using the pen tool in either Photoshop or The GIMP to isolate part of your image that you want to create a fractal of. Save it as a .PNG file so transparency is preserved. That is how I prepare my photographs to be turned into fractals.

For the next step in Ultra Fractal, you definitely need to familiar with the software to be able to use the program. I will link a tutorial you can use in the next section.

I took a long exposure of a someone waving a sparkler around, gave is a round crop, and imported it into Ultra Fractal.

This is the end result! It took forever to render, but it turned out great.