About the images: I never liked to participate in any contests, challenges or anything like that in any fractal community I’ve ever been to. I almost never tweaked someone else’s image. I hate doing it in the same way I don’t like to have my images tweaked, which is why I don’t share my parameters and or never participate in these tweak challenges. After being a member of a few mailing lists, forums and groups/communities through the years, some for a little more time than the others, I found after a while that all these became a bit boring after some time (I find it very odd that a community in Facebook for example have 30K members but just about 10 images are posted every day, and always by the same people). They all suffer from problems which I won’t describe here and I left most of them because of the general behaviour of participants of these places – you are often tempted to make images like these that get more attention, even if these aren’t your favourites or your style. I joined these places mostly to learn new techniques, look for tutorials when the softwares are too complex to learn on our own, and maybe apply some of these tips to my own images if they are interesting to my “style”, and also to occasionally display my own creations, not to participate in competitions.

All images on my site were created by me from scratch – sometimes using tutorials as a starting point, which is something different than a “challenge”, which has a theme, or a tweak contest, but most of the time it’s just from scratch trying something randomly or repeating something I already liked previously. There are millions of images that look much more interesting than mine, for several reasons. But I try as much as I can to not be influenced by any of these and copy/repeat these styles and techniques, even the most basic one layer images with traditional Mandelbrot sets or very complex images using hundreds of layers, transparencies and other available effects. And, to do that, I need to stay away as much as possible from these groups and getting from them mostly the most significant things they (sometimes) have to offer: the instructional ones. I don’t consider myself a professional artist, I make fractals as a hobby. I don’t want a medal or a prize, If I ever was asked to have my work exhibited or used somewhere else, it was because people found my work – here – and liked it and contacted me. If you like my images as they are, thank you. One reason that made me give up and get really bored with fractals was when I was almost doing that, making images to get appraisals. This time is long gone, but I have to be careful, it’s tempting to be trapped in that stuff again.

Also, my images never have any kind of “classical” post-processing, except in a very few occasions (a slight sharpening, cropping, etc.) but these are minimal. This is quite controversial, some already consider any image already post-processed even if you just add a watermark, but that’s something for another discussion. My images will also never be AI-enhanced adding these kitsch effects (maybe if AI ever comes up with something useful and really helpful, that’s another story). I tried something using AI to a couple of my fractal animations (which will appear in another section of the site soon), but they are interesting for no longer than a couple views. They’re predictable, boring, and as I’ve said, certain types of AI don’t have any interference of the artist at all.