Fractal Snake Images

1.30.2011 A nice guy named Ivan wrote to me to tell me that he'd used on of my snake photographs, of a ringneck snake, to incorporate into his fractal images at freymanart.com. Here's what he wrote:

Hi David,

I'm a computer graphics programmer and I thought you might want to see some pictures I made with one of your photos. I'm not selling or distributing these pictures... I made them just for fun.

For my self-assigned project, I needed a top-view photo of a snake that had no perspective, a solid untextured background, and lots of contrast. I found this photo here: /gallery/snake044.jpg

I isolated the part I was going to use, but unfortunately the snake's body is curved and does not complete a sinusoidal cycle so I could not make a perfectly seamless repeating tiling. This is why the snakes below are crooked. The top half of the picture shows the ideal snake tile applied to a Mandelbrot set fractal, the bottom half is the tiled snake made from your photo. The photo applied to a Julia set (coordinates +0.32, 043i) If you have any photos where the snake's body is straight or completes at least one cycle such as in the picture below, please let me know. Thanks.

Truth be told I wanted to be a herpetologist as a kid, hence my interest in snakes. However, I discovered I wasn't very good in biology so I had to abandon that profession and focus on what I was more comfortable with: computer programming and mathematics.

Regards,
Ivan

PS - I worked on that ring-neck snake picture a bit more and straightened it out in Photoshop. The results are below. Technically the ring neck snake pictures are half yours so I included our credits in the bottom right corner of each one. The text is barely visible because I didn't want it to distract from the image. At the same time, interested parties can find out who's responsible for the picture.