Wow - VERY well said, Dirk. These are the very things I've been thinking of but could never coherently express as I read the bi-monthly, or so it seems, agonizing over whether fractals and flames are "art". You have come up with just about the best wording I've heard/read on this matter, IMHO. I'll have to say right off that most of the UF things and ALL of the flames I've made merely "HAPPENED" and were not the product of a conscious effort to produce something specific that I "created" first in my mind's eye. I have typically just happened onto something and then exploited it rather than created it first in my mind. With the exception of maybe my old fractal scenes like "Depths of Orthanc", "Soulseed", "Galadriel's Muse", "Lionfish", "Vancouver Sunset" and "Bang a Gong", it's all been chance and then the exploitation of that chance occurence. But then, even most of the individual shapes of the elements in my scenes were coincidental "happy accidents", too, that I thought cool or looked like something and saved in my layer library folders for later use. It's the "dirty little secret" I think lurks at the very back of the minds of many fractal artists and why we so deeply crave acceptance of our art-form and get so defensive whenever anyone intimates that it is the computer that makes the image. I just cringe every time I read someone talk of the "hours of tweaking" they put into the fashioning of a flame and the creativity involved. Give me a break - pressing the Mutate button umpteen dozen times until something interesting shows up in the window is not consciously creating something specific as Dirk defines, above. I've never spent more than 10 minutes on a single flame after running the script or selecting it from the stack of random flames I just generated. (but then again, I'm not exactly the most accomplished flamer around either - I just tug the polygons mindlessly) If the finished flame looked like a bird, it was because I spotted it when it was randomly generated and dorked with it until it looked a maybe little more like a bird. Using a certain script will give a generally expected result but only generally. That's why you hear so much about the hundreds of RANDOM batches generated. What Keith alludes to, I think, is the limited TYPES of flames that are possible to make. I've used Apo from its very first days almost (YEARS!) and there are almost no flame types that I've seen posted that I didn't make one or see one very like it long ago. The "metal zipper" ones, the "holey" ones, the plant-like ones, the "wooly" ones, the ones with "glass squares" and so on. Yes, an experienced flame artist with a practiced eye could point out the subtle differences but, to people who don't know, they might as well be penguins. To most humans, they ALL look identical standing there in a pack on the ice but to another penguin, well they can tell them all apart very easily, thank you very much. Thinking, "I think I'll draw a giant stick-man standing in front of a flying saucer", getting a pencil and then fashioning the saucer - "ooh, how 'bout a dish antenna right here" - and the arms, legs, etc of the human form and then also having a burst of inspiration and deciding to add the words "Klaatu Barada Nicto" in the foreground in spacy script - now, that's creating something. At first, when folks started mirroring flames in Photoshop and PSP and calling it "postprocessing" seemed really cool and creative but it's been done so often as to seem banal now. But, regardless of whether one thinks they are "created by the program" or "art", there's no denying that the end products are often achingly beautiful in an abstract way or mind-bogglinly "cool" looking. They seem to affect those of us blessed to be able to "feel" abstract art in pleasurable ways that we can't quite put our finger on. Using UF though, with experience and practice with certain ucl's, affords a few more opportunities to consciously add something at least generally expected like, say, using Orbit Traps "point" to make round balls, spiky fbm Orbit Traps shapes or Glass Hemi for a sphere. But even with UF so much is trial and error. I have many presets for certain ucl's that I use that I THINK I know will have a certain effect but they many times do something either that doesn't look good or is totally unexpected and I decide to go with that. And the discovery of those settings always was the result of flipping thru all of the many function options and going with the ones that looked "cool" on a particular spiral when they "happened". Or trying every one of the trap settings in Thin Orbit Traps from A to Witch of Agnesi. On a tangent note, I'm not sure I'm happy with the Explore feature that UF4 has now. I think it has "Apophysized" the program and automated what used to be a concerted search for how the values of the parameters (most of which seem to do almost nothing! lol) actually affected the look of the fractal. Now you just click Explore and move your - sorta triangle shaped, lol - mouse around until it looks cool. I suppose that tweaking the color control points in the gradient editor also affords some conscious creativity once you figure out which parts of the gradient color which parts of the fractal. Adding light hi-lights and shadows going in the proper direction are creative touches too, I reckon. But as I said, at least for my stuff, 50% of the image is something that just happened and struck a chord within me that said "whoa, that's COOL!" and I tried stuff til it was "done". For my part, I think Keith also had a good point about stagnation, too. "Sameness". Therein lies the crux of the biscuit, I think. What's the new, original and fresh direction for this art-form? We need someone to come along with a new app or technique that is original and totally unlike anything seen b4. I've been so obsessed with fractals for so long that I'm almost sick of the ones I've made. I just do the same things over and over. I haven't made a truly original image, IMO, since maybe last December and I'm geting really frustrated and pretty close to shutting 'er down and taking a very long hiatus from it all until I can forget all my habitual "tricks" and approach these things from an entirely new mindset or direction. Everything I've posted for at least the last six months is either a tweak of an earlier image or something I started a long time ago and came back to. Not to mention that I've despaired of ever having the money and time required to actually try to sell this stuff at art festivals. Printing, matting and framing up enough stuff for a decent booth is estimated to be thousands of dollars and though I could probably "break the bank" and swing the $$ with the retention bonus my old company gave me to stay on till the very end, the bittersweet fact is that I have to go to work 8 squares a day and would get fired if I took off every other week to drive to an art show. And 90% of the people who frequent the internet are offended if something - like 3 uploads per day :-) - even costs $5. Also, short of hitting the lottery, I have no reason to expect I'll ever be one of those well-to-do retired folks with fat pensions, a Winnebago and loads of free time or who go on safari across the country as vagabond artists, unsure if they'll sell enough to make the bills this month. I do surely hope that, one day, fractals will be seen as "art" by the "mainstream" art community. There's nothing like them and VERY few people in the world know how to do this stuff. We are even somewhat shunned by digital artists as well as 2d artists. A guy I've met at my new job is a 2d (oils) and digital (Wacom tablet) painter and, though he really likes my stuff and SAYS he wants to buy a print of one, it seems he's always probing to understand what role the computer program played in the creation of my images and whether I meant them they way they turned out. Note this year's AOY is again not a fractallist. Even other digital artists may have a small perception that we don't really "create" our images in the traditional sense of the word. One look at Sven's gallery will show ALL of the images were created with something definite and specific in mind before he plotted the first pixel. Amazing stuff, too! Sorry if I sound negative and I hope I haven't offended anyone. I include myself in any critical statements as they are basically criticism of my own stuff. I'm just going thru a VERY dark and listless spell with my fractals and it's really got me down and this thread set me off... Rick