Jeremy Thomson

I probably generated my first mandelbrot in '86 a year or so after the famous Scientific American article. A work-mate brought in the magazine and following his instructions (I knew nothing of complex numbers) I coded up a simple C program on the office IBM AT, it had a colour screen! A 320x200 2bit image might take the whole night to generate. Nowadays the images are bigger and 24 bit but with each advance in processors just tempts you to zoom in further. I don't like leaving my PC generating picture for more than a couple of days. After a three day marathon in summer the PC got too hot and just stopped!

These days I use fractal extreme, its allows nice anti-aliased images without having to pay. I miss the palette control of Ultra Fractal but every time you adjusted the palette mapping UF would recalculate, Fractal Extreme has a 'preserve iterations' setting to avoid this. The CUDA mandelbrot generator is nice and fast but the palette control is awful. Some dudes are using FPGAs to calculate mandelbrots, makes sense, you need 256 bit multiplication or better for really deep zooms.

Most of my pix are multi layered assembled together with Gimp. Changing the palette mapping shows up the stripes and layering on top less stripey versions still allows you to see the big structure behind the noise. Layering different palletes muddies up the colours and gets away from the day-glo instense colours you often see in mandlebrot pix.