Welcome to Fractal Forums

Hi all,
my name is Giovanni and I'm  researcher in computer science here in Italy.

In my spare time I  play with (integer) numbers and I help editing  the
Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (http://oeis.org (http://oeis.org))

Few months ago I needed to write a program under linux with a graphical output. I'm too old for
complicated things so I thought to look for the simplest library to plot some pixels in a window
and learn to use it through some examples, which I searched in the fractal community.

One thing led to another, and I spent some time creating a very rough program for iterating
a given complex function, until it converges, diverges, or reaches a given number of iterations.

Then I started experimenting with more or less random functions, until I produced "soothing" images
(no science involved here, just fun).

To be honest, most of the images I create are not even fractals, because I stop the iterations before chaos breaks free...

Anyway, even if my "creations" are very very naif in comparison with the 3D or deep zoom wonders I see here,
I humbly entered the contest just to get some feedback.
(see some of my pictures here http://www.numbersaplenty.com/images/ (http://www.numbersaplenty.com/images/))

Giovanni

They are truly lovely, congrats on your work.

You have a good eye for coloring, very tasteful and pleasing.

Thanks.

As an outsider in the world of fractals, I have to admit that sometimes
I'm not fully satisfied with the palette choices even in great pictures I see around.

Maybe it's because I'm in a quite grim phase in my life, but I tend to prefer
"soothing" shapes and colors.

In my little program I did the following: I collected some palettes from Internet,
probably some came from Matlab, plus I mercilessly stolen a bunch of palettes from
Mathematica. I was too lazy to program a manual creation of a palette, color by color.

At that point I realized that using single palettes, even those that are non monochromatic,
often produced boring pictures, so I usually do the following:

I select a number of random palettes, say 4, and then I  create a new palette
taking  1/4 of the colors of each of the 4 random palettes.

In this way I have both sharp and smooth color transitions in the same picture.

Clearly, since I use randomness, I have to try a lot of combinations before I find
one I like, but is it a way to pass time. (I also store random combinations I really like,
to be tried later on).

To assign colors to values, I generally sort the values (or they logs) in all the picture and select
intervals in such a way that each of the 256 colors in the palette is used in about 1/256 of the pixel.

I don't know if this technique has a name, it seemed the natural thing to do.