Hello, welcome back to I photography course on YouTube. Now today we're going to have a look at a bit of fractal photography and that's where we're going to take a little object such as this and it helps us transform a photograph like this into something like this. You intrigued? I bet you are. So this is going to be one of the most budget friendly hacks that we've given you so far. You can play with a camera. You can play with a smartphone. It really makes no difference. If you want to just add a few abstract vibes to your photograph then this is the video to watch. So once you've got your camera all you're going to need is your fractal prop and you won't be surprised if you've actually got one line at home already. So to help you find the right prop you need to know what a fractal is. Now the dictionary definition of a fractal is a geometrical shape where each part has characteristics of the whole object just like snowflakes they have rear-carrying patterns at different scales. So if it sounds a little bit of complex don't worry we've got a list of three different types of fractals that are really really cheap to buy and they're going to be so useful to try out with this project. So here they are. First up we've got prisms. They are the easiest shape to work with. Cheap to buy it online but make sure you get the clear glass ones and not the plastic versions. Second up we've got crystal balls. Now don't plum for the smooth ones but the ones with a triangular patterns all over them. This will really help with the distorted effect. Number three how about some kaleidoscopic lenses. You're struggle to use a classic kaleidoscope as it's not transparent enough but you can get fractal lenses from a pair of kids kaleidoscope sunglasses and just pop the lenses out. You'll even find that some decorative suncatches have lots of little fractal glasses dangling from them which are really good to use but you could just simply use a nice little crystal glass obviously just be careful when you do. Either way whatever you use to create this effect no two images are going to be the same. To plan a prove that point what we've done is got three of our favorite different types of fractals we've got prism crystal balls and those kaleidoscope glasses that we mentioned and we're going to take them out into the field and give them a bit of a spin. So we've come outside now just to try out some of the fractals we were talking about a little bit earlier. First up we wanted to use the prism fractal so you can get these in loads of different places online it's probably going to be a best bet. The one thing to watch out for is to make sure you get a solid glass prism as opposed to some of the plastic ones you may find it online. Now with the camera there's no specific setup that you really need. You can try this on a tripod you can do it handheld if you feel on a little bit more adventurous but we've got kind of a nice little set of here with a few puddles on the floor so I'm actually going to take the camera off the tripod and we'll get down and we'll try something a little bit quirky. So all I've done is just just mounted the camera off the tripod got really really low down. I've just flipped the screen out on the back of the camera as well just to help me kind of get my composition a little bit more straight on. Just withholding the prism this is why it's really good to get the longer ones because it gives you that little bit more kind of placement that you've your fingers won't get in the shot on the end of it so all you need to do is kind of get quite low down if you want to try something with a little bit more of a kind of an acute angle and it's just the case of holding the actual prism in front of the camera. It doesn't have to go straight in front of it you can have it to the side you can have it angled and that's up to you to play with. I also want to try a little bit of some floral photography with the prism as well. I think it could be quite interesting to see how it translates with close subshots have to do and some of those images of the puddle. So same again I'm just going to hold it a slightly kind of more in an angle this time and just focus the focus point should always remain on your actual subject. Never try to kind of focus on the prism itself because it takes away the distorted effect so even if you focus first and then actually bring in the prism. So the thing that I'm finding kind of primarily with the prism is that it splits the shot obviously down the middle or across the centre of the photograph and wondering if some of the other fractals we've got make it was a slightly more kind of tripier perspective but they've actually come out really nicely. So I think what we'll do will change for a little while and we'll switch over to one of our other other fractals. So the next fractal I wanted to try was the crystal ball. It's a slightly quirky kind of little construction and you see the way it's got a pointed tip but it kind of a flat bottom there. So I've just been kind of experimenting with it already just to kind of see what kind of perspectives I get and already it's quite different each way you look at it. So we're just going to try a nice big wide landscape shot and there's actually a tree kind of directly in front of me behind you that wanted to kind of capture in the centre and just try and see what effect it creates behind. Just with all these different angled surfaces obviously light is going to come in differently through each one so we'll give it a try and see how it works. So at the same time I'm going to just keep the ball right up in front of the lens. So it's completely flat to the lens this time as opposed to being kind of off centre. Pretty and that's really, really, really quirky actually. It's more like a kaleidoscope than I thought it would be actually. So I'm already getting some really really quirky shots. There's almost like a kaleidoscope the way that I get multiple versions of the tree around and that's just using the flat face. So I'm going to try again some similar but using all the different angled triangles. So what I'm starting to find is that shooting through all the triangles on the side it gives it it works more in lines as opposed to obviously the bottom of the being circular it gives us that kind of kaleidoscopic effect in circular pattern using the triangles on the side. Everything's a little bit more linear as you can see from some of the shots. So as I say there's some really good benefits to this. There's some parts of it I don't think personally work as well. They're a little bit harder to see in terms of the finished result. But handling that's another kind of thing just to bring up quickly. This is a fairly decent size ball. I think it's the 80mm that we went for. You can get smaller ones. Again you can get larger ones. So I just recommend that's a decent size to go with. I think it fits comfortably in the hand. Anything smaller you may end up getting more of your fingers into the shot depending on the size of your lens. So yeah if you kind of maybe stick with that maybe go a little bit larger. Everyone it just means your hands are going to get in the shot. But what we'll do we'll put this to a side and we'll try our last fractal. So what we decided to do now for our little third fractal is just pop out one of the lenses from the Clidoscope classes that I showed you a bit earlier. So just taking them out if you can't take them out of a pair that you've got then there's no harm with that you're just using the glasses anyway and just holding them over the front of the lens. Now I've got Becky in with us as well. So we just try a little bit of a portrait shot and I'm just going to hold the lens itself right in front of the lens of the camera and try and see what kind of effects it creates. So you can see that it's going to darken the screen quite a bit because of the purple coating that's on the front of the lens itself. So you may need to overexpose your original shot over and slow the shutter speed down. Now normally with the work with fractals like this it doesn't really matter too much about the settings that you use it's just about the effect but hopefully you can see that coming through on the screen at the back here. So all I've noticed is that given the position of the fractal obviously it's bending line pushing light into the actual camera in different directions. So I've just noticed there's a couple of little leaves that I can actually see just to the side of me behind me. I want to try and see if we can actually get a shot where the light's coming in from behind through into the lens at the front. So even though the actual camera's facing one direction and photographing Rebecca here is actually just behind me. So just bear with me this may not be as easy as I initially think. Given that some really nice portraits it's actually quite kind of quirky to think or to think that the Becky's actually stood behind the camera in effect. I'm still able to take photographs of her but this is actually proven quite quite easy to work with. Quite easy to twist around in the hand so I think it's probably a little bit easier certainly than the ball but then the prism as well. So there we have it we've tried out three different fractals from the prism, the crystal ball and the kaleidoscope lens. What we'll actually do is take some of the shots that we've taken this afternoon and actually put them up on social media so you can have a look yourselves and you know let us know which your favourites are. Obviously if you've tried out a similar project yourself if you found different fractals to use please let us know. We're all over Facebook and Instagram and Twitter so you can tag us and pictures there. Obviously there's the descriptions and the comments all down below. 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