Some F.A.Qs. about FRACTALS and some other subjects related to this site and its images (updated May 18th 2004)
a small part of this text was taken from this site)
Fractals,
Fractal softwares and Fractal Art
Q: What is a fractal? What are some examples of fractals?
A:
A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in
parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the
whole. Fractals are generally self-similar and independent of scale.
There are many mathematical structures that are fractals; e.g. Sierpinski triangle,
Koch snowflake, Peano curve, Mandelbrot set, and Lorenz attractor. Fractals
also describe many real-world objects, such as clouds, mountains, turbulence,
and coastlines, that do not correspond to simple geometric shapes.
According to Mandelbrot, who invented the word: "I coined fractal
from the Latin adjective fractus. The corresponding Latin verb frangere
means "to break:" to create irregular fragents. It is therefore sensible
- and how appropriate for our needs! - that, in addition to "fragmented"
(as in fraction or refraction), fractus should also mean
"irregular," both
meanings being preserved in fragment." (The Fractal Geometry
of Nature, page 4.)
A: Fractint is a very popular freeware fractal generator. There are DOS, Windows, OS/2, and Unix/X versions. The DOS version is the original version, and is the most up-to-date. There is a new Amiga version. More information here.
A: Ultrafractal is a very powerful fractal generator for Windows. It expands the capabilities of the regular fractal softwares by allowing you to make images with millions of colours (Fractint for instance only allows 256 colours), layering, and the option to render your images in very large sizes.
A: Try this link.
Q: Where can I get more information about other softwares used to create fractals and information about fractal art?
A: Try this link.
About www.fractalland.com and my works
Q:
What's the best way to navigate fractalland.com?
A: There is a menu at the left side of the main page, with links to all the galleries.
All the images are classified into "galleries" based on their main colours. If its main colour is red, it's in the red gallery and so on.
Some images may have been placed in another categories - the images done with Apophysis for example are all in the Black and White galleries.
You'll see many images with 2 colours (that have their own individual galleries), and I just try to guess which one is the dominant colour and place it in the proper category. Some kind of colours don't have their own categories (like sepia, brown, and all pastel tones in general), and they probably will be placed in the "Rainbow" gallery.
All the galleries are composed of individual pages with thumbnails of the images, and there is a menu at the left where you can navigate through the pages in that specific category. Every thumbnail opens a larger version of the image in a separate page (probably it's correct for all the images), and each image maximum size will be around 800 X 600 pixels with a few exceptions.
The images aren't in a database anymore, but now a hotlink protection was added. Now all the images are visible with any browser. It might be possible that you are getting a weird layout due to CSS incompatibilities with old browsers. The recommended browsers are IE 6 and Mozilla/Thunderbird/Firefox. I haven't tested it with Opera or Safari, but it probably works.
In the galleries pages, you can notice that there are links to 50 pages, but there aren't 50 pages on each category. These were placed just to make the further editings easier.
Q:How do I find out what's new since my last visit, since there are so many pages to see?
A: All the updates are reported in this site. Most of the time, the new images are added to the last pages of the galleries. But it may not happen this way, sometimes I have to adjust each gallery layout to accomodate new images/pages, and some new images may end up being displayed in the first page(s) of each gallery, or the images can be just reorganized/renamed from time to time.
Q: Is there a sequence in the images, being the first images you ever did posted in the first pages of each section, or should they be viewed following a specific order?
A: No. I have them mixed all the way. Of course, the last pages may include just newer images, and since I've been improving my technique since I first started, they might look "better" to some of you. There are some of my old images that are still amongst my favourite images, after all this time. Someday I'll probably split my images according to the software(s) used to create them, even though I don't use as many softwares as possible. Update: Fractint images have a separate gallery.
Q: I can't save your images neither set them to be used as a wallpaper, why?
A: I had a right-click blocking javascript some time ago, that was the only way to protect my images from being used without authorization. Now I've moved to a new server and I've added other forms of protection, and, in fact, now you can save the images. The images can now be saved, but please respect the copyrights and if you are going to use it in some commercial project, please ask for permission. All the images now have a watermark, which should be kept at all times. Images without a watermark may or not be furnished for certain projects, you should ask first for availability. The images have varying degrees of JPEG compression, I tried to keep them with a quality level that won't affect their display on screen but will not let you print them correctly. For a quality print, you'll need much better rendered versions than these on the site.
Q: I can't see any of your images. Why?
The vast majority of visitors seem not to have this problem, it's due to firewall settings. Those of you who use Norton or some other types of firewall software will have problems seeing the images if it is not configured to allow referrer information to be received by the site (if you use ZoneAlarm for example and if "remove private header information" in the Cookies section is checked, you can't see the images). The way .htaccess works is by reading the referrer information and comparing it to a list of acceptable referrers. If the referrer does not match the list, or is not present (because sending its information was disabled by the firewall), access to the files is blocked. I have a "global" .htaccess file that works for all the folders and files in the site, and if the referrer cannot be read, even if it is from my own site, the image you are trying to see will be denied access. Check your firewall software and see if it can be configured to allow referrer access (it's not that harmful to enable it). Most firewall softwares will have an option to allow referrer information only for a specific site; in that case, add my sites to that option: http://www.baco.nu , http://www.fractalland.com or http://www.picturesfromcurevision.com. People who use the firewall component that comes with Windows XP will not have this problem. I cannot tell you what settings you have to change, try to read your firewall's help file.
Sometimes, another error that happens when the .htaccess is misconfigured (I have to use a special version to avoid this error, the default versions of my web server are faulty) is the lack of a slash bar at the end of an URL making all the images not to appear. I don't know why this happens (technically speaking), but if *ALL* the images of a specific kind (say all the JPGs) of a page aren't showing up, try also adding a slash bar at the end of the URL and they will appear. I couldn't see my images if I was typing http://www.baco.nu in the browser's address bar, but it worked if I typed www.baco.nu (without the http://) or http://www.baco.nu/ (with the slash bar at the end).
Q: Why your watermarks display a different URL than www.fractalland.com? Aren't these your images?
A: This is because my fractal site has got its domain name just a few months ago, so older images still have the watermarks pointing to their first URLs (http://www.baco.nu/fracts or http://www.baco.nu/fractals).
Q: Can I use your images in my site?
A: Well... yes and no. There are two different situations regarding "unathorized" usage of the images: You liked one of the images and want it to be your new wallpaper. Fine. Go ahead (I can't control this anyway). The other situation is: You liked the image etc. and you try to make profit out of it, or selling printed reproductions. or you want to use it in your band's CD cover art as if it is YOUR image. This is illegal, these images aren't public domain. If you don't know what a copyright is, or worse, if you don't care, stop reading here. Or you can be nice and do like these guys, who wanted to use one of my images in their new CD artwork, and asked for permission to do that (of course, after paying a small fee :P ). Many people have e-mailed me saying that they can save the images and bypass all the protections. If you know how to do it, it's not that hard, go ahead. I just wanted people to be nice and respect other people's work. One day it might happen to you.
Another very frequent situation is the "hotlinking", where you have a link in your site or post a link somewhere (like in a weblog or public forum for example) to an image that is located in someone else's server. This is a bit controversial, some people actually like these kind of links, but this way you're stealing someone else's bandwidth, which is something they had to pay for, not you. This is also wrong and it is called "bandwidth theft". Yes, theft. I've moved to a new server and now I can use a .htaccess file, so any attempt of hotlinking will not work. If you want to hotlink, you'll get nothing but another image saying that you're trying to hotlink to my image, and this just can't be bypassed or disabled by you.
More on copyrights: according to modern copyright laws, everything one produces is copyrighted, whether it has a copyright notice on it or not (of course, adding a © helps a bit, some people can't understand things if they aren't explicit!). That means it cannot legally be used without my explicit permission, to any purpose. All my artwork is copyrighted (yours too, if you have a website - even the ugliest animated GIF you did is your property). I also hold copyright for ALL my graphics, text, and HTML, except when noted. It doesn't matter whether the person who uses someone else's work would profit from that use or not (some people when taken to court claim that they didn't want to make profit from that work), what matters is whether or not it is used with permission of the person who did it. There is a legal permission for that kind of use (fair use), which doesn't require a fee or a finantial compensation for the usage. Again, ask me if you want to use anything. I'm not that evil, if you follow the rules.
Q: Can I add a link to your site?
A: Yes of course. Just don't try to display ANY image in this site (it won't work), try to link to the image's location using a text link. Or link to the main fractal page, using the following code (copy the text that is in yellow):
<A HREF="http://www.fractalland.com">your text</a>
There is now a little image that you can use as a banner to link to fractalland.com. It's in the main page, at the bottom left of the page.
If you want to have your gallery page to be linked in my fractal links page, just send me an e-mail with some basic info about your site and its URL.
Q: I am interested in getting some printed versions of your images, how can I do that if I can't save them to my computer?
A: All the images in the site weren't done thinking (at first, at least) of printing them, they were created for being displayed at the Web only. But they look great when printed in large sizes. But for doing that, they need to be re-rendered with the proper settings for printing.
Images that are made for being displayed in a computer screen only have a much lower resolution than images that are prepared for professional printings (they have 72 D.P.I. while professional prints require at least 300 D.P.I.), plus they have been converted to JPEG format, that is a format that causes some varying loss to the quality of the images. In some cases, the images were heavily compressed, or to make them load faster, or to intentionally downgrade the printing quality.
Due to
the nature of these images (they weren't produced using a paint program
like Microsoft Paint or Corel Photopaint or Photoshop or any other, but
they are done by processing equations in the fractal generator software),
it is possible to recreate most of these images to be professionally printed,
at (almost) any size, in (almost) any resolution, using these same equations
(this is called a "parameter
set" - each image has its own, it's like a recipe of a cake). If you are
interested in purchasing a printed version of any of my images, contact me
at 
(don't click the image, it won't lead you nowhere... just type this e-mail
address in your e-mail software. I am able just to provide you with a printed
version in a quality paper (glossy/photo), but I cannot do the framing/matting
for you. Prices may vary depending on the image and the required size, plus
the shipping costs.
Q: Will you be making any of these "recipes" to recreate the images available?
A: No, no and no. If you want to share/get parameter files for Ultrafractal or Apophysis, I suggest you trying to join the UltraFractal Mailing List. More info about the list in the Ultrafractal resources page.
With Fractint, a fractal generator (still for DOS), it's possible to edit/rebuild the image if you load the image if it is in .GIF format, but not in the GIF format that is currently used for Internet, Fractint uses an older GIF format. I still have a few GIF images, but if you try to load them in Fractint, they can open and be displayed but you won't be able to edit them because they were saved in this newer GIF format and lost their "fractal" capabilities.
Q: Do you have any set of formulas for UltraFractal or other fractal softwares, written by you, that you could share with us?
A: No, I don't have a clue about how to make these formulas. I'm not a formula writer. There are some links in the Ultrafractal resources page, linked above.
Q: Have you been in any art exhibition?
A: Yes, I was just invited to my first exhibition, in Spain, about a year ago. There's a link to the exhibition's site in the main page. And I've also participated in another exhibition at the Lincoln Center NYC promoted by MOCA (Museum of Computer Art), which started January 3rd 2004. This art show was also extended to the city of New Jersey, for more 15 days. More info about it in the galleries entry page (some links to the exhbiitions might have been removed).