Oh, Arista, the birds are outside my house... I don't have them, I just hear them. When the night is gone during my Screen play, I am probably not able to see them anymore (the birds I mean...).
:-)

Some of my last posts were finished when the birds started to sing in the morning :-)

To SAH: Why should you delete any images here? There is nothing that offends me in your images. You have some wonderful Gnarly spirals that are finite and no fractals. But I assumed that you made them with UF. If I am wrong with this, you surely used another Fractal generator - that really does not matter to me. I just wanted to get some opinions about where to post the images - decide by the program or decide by the image. That's all.

Steven, some of your images are no fractals, they just come out of UF. But they can be found in the Fractal gallery too...

I normally start when the children are in bed and my wife and I start our hobby work. That's normally in the evening. Sometimes I finish my images in the morning, but seldom. Other times: when I'm alone at home. That sometimes happens in the weekends. Music is not necessary, neither silence, only a good mood. Aggressions keep me away from doing good work.

Keep on doodling and trying out. Read the tutorials. Good fractals are piece of hard work (at least for me).

No Marvilla works with UF, and I still don't know where she is now. It's a pity that she stopped showing her work.

Fractals have the advantage that you can go and "explore" some image universes before you start your image. You can let you guide to a start, you don't have to work from scratch. You can play until the game changes to "serious". You can let yourself inspire by your fractal findings. That makes it easy to begin.
Therefore fractal art is very often the art of finishing something, not only of finding something. But IMHO it is not so often the art of beginning. And that might be a disadvantage in the eyes of other 2D art forms and styles. And if you forget to really finish your image (find the right location, the correct zoom, the adequate colours and textures) you have restricted yourself to the pure finding phase. And you have to decide by yourself if it was art what you did.
To sit and plan an image, start with a white sheet or an empty working window is much more difficult. But it is very satisfying. My white paper is a new geometric design that has to be coded first before I start to create one or two or three images from it. Therefore I see my newer UCLs (that aren't public anymore) as a part of the creative process, as a part of the image or art.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=190217

When I posted the Try Weave image, it was NOT my own fav - but it got good feedback. The Try LDM from yesterday and the Try Elliptic from today are nearly ignored, although I like them very much and made great efforts to create them as they are...
I will continue creating the images that I like, perhaps asking if I'm in doubt, ...
Feedback from the Non-Fracs is sometimes surprising, but always a good hint into a more general direction, i.e. to make good Fractal Art good Art too.

Locating the center on a northern point etc...
Better: Move the layer a bit to the north, the south, ... and then subtract all these moved layers from the original one but only with opacity a bit less than 25 percent.

fBm texture is something to create cloudy structures with. It was brought into UF by Damien M. Jones but not everyone was allowed to write new code using it.

Therefore Samuel Monnier made the SFBM - having nearly the same effects and the actual version - SFBM II - is a work of a genious :-)

Convolution is a technique to iterate an internal layer say located on a central point, on a northern point, a southern point, a western point, and an eastern point. Every point has a certain weight in this iteration and summing up. Let's say 4+something for the center and -1 for all the other points. That results in having most of the plane without a colour but at the shapes' edges you can see something - the outline of the shapes plus a little bit more.
Try it out with five layers in photoshop. But the results are not as good as in one UCL having this convolution feature.

It was Mark Townsend (mt.ucl) who brought this technique to UF.

I sometimes work with PP but on a very beginner's level. And since I often foret how to achieve a certain effect again after having layered some PP'ed versions of the same fractal I always get depressed that my effects cannot be repeated (by me).
My greatest love is to produce several effects on my own, therefore I spend most of my fractal time with creating code, watching its effect on some standard Julia spirals or the primitive Pixel formula (a non-fractal fractal) and then delete these experiments.
What I like when working with fractals is - I can reproduce the image at any scale, zoom in and discover new "images", work on them, zoom in again, ...
As soon as I have PP'ed a fractal, this possibility is gone.
And my non-fractals made in a fractal generator - I stop when I am content with them, therefore PP is not necessary, or I am too lazy to do it...
Thanx for this interesting thread!

I think 3 images is more than enough, the flood of images without a serious pre-choice of their poster(s) made me run away from Fractal World...