4 min 1

Does Jos Leys Have Super-Powers?

It was a dark and stormy night. Inside the castle, the notorious Dr. Leys was busy working away in his laboratory. Either by serendipitous discovery, maniacal experimentation, or exhaustion brought on by long bouts of…
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2 min 1

Fractal Printmaking

Hey fans. Welcome back to the award-winning Image of the Week series here on Orbit Trap — your one stop clearinghouse for all things fractal. Today’s King for a Week is none other than the…
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1 min 0

And 6 More Reviews Using 6 Words

A Bride’s Night by FarDareisMai No more Starbucks for flower girls. Fractal Image 2766 by Jock Cooper Well built. Dual core. Intel Inside. The Sun is Playing by Elizabeth Mansco Heat index blues? Hit the…
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6 min 1

Image of the Weak: Fractal Art

I used to go hunting for exciting new images. Now I’m content if I can just find something that looks different. I don’t care if it’s great or not. The Golden Age of Heroes is…
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2 min 0

Art Fist: The Brutal Code of Color!

Sterli30.loo I made this image in Sterlingware with only a slight hue shift in XnView, my trusty side-kick. Although Sterlingware is now over 10 years old, which is pretty old by software standards, and lacks…
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3 min 0

No Remorse

[Photograph seen on Memory and Desire.] The “jury” is still out as to whether the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest will be held again this year, so we don’t yet know whether its judges will…
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1 min 1

Ultra Fractal 5: SwastikaCurveTrap!

Alright. Sure. The swastika is an ancient symbol found in a number of cultural contexts and therefore has more than one meaning and significance. It also, I suppose, could be described as a simple geometric…
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1 min 0

6 More Reviews Using 6 Words

Evolving by Maria K. Lemming Lines. Motion. Color. Perspective. Whimsey. Wonderful. X09202 by Joseph Presley Whose woods these are? Don’t ask! Undone by Joel Faber Let’s see my brother top this. Calla Lily by Susan…
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4 min 2

Ultra Fractal 5 — For Engineers Only!

I think the developers of Ultra Fractal 5 have fallen into the trap that has plagued fractal programs from the earliest days: overly complicated, user-dependent configuration. I have always gotten the feeling, the several times…
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3 min 0

Mark Townsend: Son of Pollock!

Emergence by Mark Townsend 2006 While writing a recent posting, I was Googling to find Mark Townsend’s orbit trap works done using the image importer, Sprite, and I surfed head first into a coral reef…
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3 min 1

Layering the Lily: Ultra Fractal 5

“See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.” That Biblical quotation…
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3 min 0

Image of the Week: Polyscene

I stumbled on another interesting find over at Flickr.com: Fractal Origami. fractal by polyscene Although I’m sure work like this is painstaking and requires considerable skill in the more advanced origami techniques (there’s a special…
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7 min 0

An "Our Ears Are Burning" Update

I’ve been experiencing hot flashes around the ears lately. I think a round-up of the latest buzz reactions to Orbit Trap might be in order. Let’s start with Keith MacKay’s most recent exercise in pouting:…
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3 min 0

Disappeared Art

Disappearing should be an art form, a seductive way of leaving the world. I believe that part of disappearing is to disappear before you die, to disappear before you have run dry, while you still…
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2 min 0

Fractal Universe Calendar …In Retreat

Funny, I was Googling something a week ago, and while following a link to the 2009 gallery of winning images for the Fractal Universe Contest I found myself looking at an error page. These things…
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1 min 0

Fuzzy Times in Fractalville

My apologies to jamfancy, Funny Bunny and tibiloo, but I found this online vignette was just too precious not to share it with the loyal, die-hard, though thick and thin, grassroots supporters of Orbit Trap…
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4 min 0

Manas Dichow – Image of the Week

“After 85 gazillion fractals, I broke the camera out.”-Manas Dichow on his Flickr site Egold: “Love this one but it’s pity that yo’ve gone into “fractals” dream.” Manas Dichow: “egold, Photography isn’t dead yet. Fractals…
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17 min 2

What We Know and What We Don’t Know

Six Images from The Fractal Universe Calendar 2010 Break out the cheese dip, fractal artists. Your 2010 Fractal Universe Calendar (hereafter known as the FUC) has finally arrived. You might not have noticed, though. Although…
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3 min 0

Image of the Week: Paul DeCelle

Moment in Blue by Paul DeCelle Ultra Fractal is certainly versatile but too often images produced with it quickly lose their freshness to my eyes. The reason is found in its composing process in which…
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5 min 2

Contests for Dummies

Chapter One: What is a contest? “an occasion on which a winner is selected from among two or more contestants”wordnet.princeton.edu “A contest, is an event in which two or more individuals or teams compete against…
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4 min 11

Darts for Keith

Welcome back all you faithful Orbit Trap fans to this week’s episode of, “Image of the Week”. Well, as you may have guessed from the title, this review is not going to be pretty. Keep…
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3 min 0

Image of the Week: Stacy Reed

A Farewell to Regret by Stacy Reed Popular fractal programs certainly take their share of hard knocks. Apophysis, for example, seems to fiind itself frequently floating in critical backwash, and here on OT we’ve been…
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2 min 0

Spleen

Spleen (2008) [Click on the image above to see the view with binoculars.] The first section, entitled “Spleen et idèal,” opens with a series of poems that dramatize contrasting views of art, beauty, and the…
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2 min 0

To the Reader

To the Reader (2008) [Click on the image above to see the view with binoculars.] The poems [in Flowers of Evil] found a small but appreciative audience, but greater public attention was given to their…
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3 min 3

Kudos to Kerry

We’re starting a new weekly feature here on Orbit Trap. Every week we’ll be reviewing an interesting piece of Fractal artwork. This is nothing radical, of course; many sites do this sort of thing, but…
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3 min 0

Fractal Art is mainstream now!

Yes. Apparently all the diseases and infirmities that I’ve been complaining about in the Fractal Art world are widespread and commonplace — in the mainstream. The Fractalbook people that I said were obscuring the really…
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