An open letter to !ultraartist Mark Fisher and anyone else who has the params he distributed:

It's a while since I've been producing anything fractal related or been active on deviant art.

However I am aware of the latest chapter in the stolen parameter file saga and am aware that some of my parameters are amongst those recently distributed by !ultraartist Mark Fisher.

For those who need filling in, the saga started about a year ago when a deviant by the name of !debora321 sent around a piece of software claiming it would speed up ultrafractal. A lot of trusting people ran the software only to find out that all it did was send their parameters strait back to !debora321. Lots of people were rightly upset about this and as a result of the furore !debora321 deactivated his/her DA account.

Question:

If !debora321's actions took half the intellect that I'm assuming it did, why didn't he/she just write an in interesting algorithm in uf and create stunning original art rather than resorting to criminal behaviour?

More recently !ultraartist: Mark Fisher has been distributing parameters, some of which can only have been sourced from the aforementioned cyber theft, much to further upset of the copyright holders. A folder of my parameters were amongst those being distributed. The pars contains most of my work from the SFBM 2 gallery plus a few others by another artist here on DA.

Question

How did my parameters end up there when I never received the Trojan software?

Answer: because I freely shared them. If you mail me and ask nicely, I'll show you my parameters. I guess one of the people I shared with then passed them on, or they were scraped off their pc's by the Trojan.

Mark Fisher complained about us all keeping secrets as an excuse for sending around the parameter files without our consent. We are all apparently protecting the arcane art of fractal creation from any "Johnny come Lately's" like Mark so he cannot possibly join the elite. (lol)

Well I have news for you Mark. If you look at my SFBM pars you will NOT see how I created my images. I will tell you now how I created them:

I loaded Sam Monnier's SFBM 2 formula and EXPLORED IT. ...and I saved the results. ...and I messed around with the gradient. I repeated the process many times. I found a look that I liked and many others have said they like it too. (Others have said they are indifferent to it, meh). I chose the cool ones and put them on Deviant Art. And they have got way more interest then my more "technical" pieces.

I think this is about style not technique and there's no secret arcane knowledge to be gleaned from those parameters. It was image creation at its simplest, exploring and tweaking and publishing the ones I thought looked good.

One of my  favourite fractal artists once said to me that producing fractal art was about what you throw away as much as what you keep.

We've all been there, Mark, et al; we stumble on the gallery of a Fractal Artist God and we say to ourselves "I want to create that, it looks cool". I have a gallery of stuff that's done in the same vain as some of Mark Townsend's work (Masking and Shaping). It's derivative but I got great satisfaction from doing it. They are all original works - I didn't start with Marks Townsends parameters, however the techniques and the formulae used are all his. I guess I hadn't found my own voice then. (and probably still haven't even now...)

And that, I think, is what this hobby is all about. By all means read all the free tutorials on the Internet, study parameter files and dissect them  (not without permission from the original authors though), pay for Janet's courses if you like (its well written and as comprehensive as it can be), learn all the technique you can and try and emulate your favourite artists.

Or just fire up sfbm 2 (or insert formula here) and play with the numbers and see what you get. Find your voice. It can be as simple or as complicated as you like.

BTW if anyone finds my parameters useful, drop me a note and let me know. If you'd be kind enough to mention me when publishing a derivative work I would be very happy.

Cheers
Steve

Errata: I originally said that !debora321 was banned from DA. In fact he/she deactivated her account after the furore his/her actions caused.

• The Red Room


• Masking and Shaping


• Gnarl Studies


• Spirals


• SFBM 2


• Mandelbrot Zooms


• Nova Mandelbrot Zooms


• Newton and Magnet Mandelbrot Explorations


• Other Stuff