The definition of “fractal” (from the Latin “fractus”, “broken”; coined by Benoit Mandelbrot in the 1970s) could include “self-similar at different scales.” Think of any naturally occurring branching structure, such as trees, from trunk to twigs, or our own venous and arterial systems for carrying blood through the human body. Without other visual clues, when you see a part of a fractal object, you might have no idea what its size is, tiny or huge.
The largest number of scales displaying fractal patterns in nature is found in clouds, from may miles across down to the limits of what the unaided human eye can see. This became evident to me recently in my own work, when over the course of a day I took over 1100 photos, all from one of the upstairs windows of our house in the mountains of Svaneti. This is a personal record for a day’s shooting. I could never have imagined doing this with 35mm film, which has a maximum of 36 frames per standard roll: that would changing film over 30 times! Indeed, some of the cloud formations I was noticing had become something slightly or even significantly different as I raised the camera to my eye to shoot.
I was using only my big 70-300mm lens for all this, and it allowed me to probe into the details of the raging cloud formations as they moved across the “mountain wall” with its rock faces and mixed forests. Here, I was seeing for the first time the amount of detail one can find in a cloud when zooming in to it, especially evident when it is moving and mutating fast in high winds. Not only were there wonderfully mysterious scenes of evergreen trees emerging from fog; there were also plenty of new dragon forms, faces, and other creatures coming and going, as I wrote last week. A lot of this only became evident in what we call “post”, the time of processing one’s images in a computer, optimizing contrast, choosing black and white or color output (mostly the former for me).
Without the clue of trees for scale, one could simply not know the size of what one is seeing. Rock, too, has fractal structure, to further confuse things; only the pines give hints of what could be inches or miles across. This is the nature of fractals in nature. Look into water slowly moving from one puddle on a slope to another, and take a shot. With nothing else in the frame, is it a whole river in Iceland, or… just something at your feet? Could be either, or anything in between.
Having been an avid consumer of fractal geometry books and images since I was a teenager, perhaps it’s no wonder that this is one of the lenses through which I see both the natural and mathematical worlds. It never gets boring, always brings wonder and delight, as my sensitivity to pattern kicks in. The mathematical fractals are exact self-copies at scales instead of self-similar, unless one builds in a randomization factor, which I don’t.
In any case, how one SEES the world is very much linked with one’s understanding of it, in my experience. One thing is for sure: for me it’s never boring.
BLOG by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
