Kaleidoscopic images

Have you ever thought about taking pictures through a kaleidoscope? It’s pretty much impossible because the viewfinder is so small. But the intriguing designs and colors are breathtaking, and I’ve always wanted to be able to capture the abstractions.

Many years ago before the digital revolution, I made a kaleidoscope for photography. I had a glass shop cut three pieces of mirror 6 x 12 inches each. I then used duct tape and taped them together with the mirrored surface inside the triangle. By placing a wide angle lens inside, the result was a kaleidoscopic interpretation of anything the camera could see. The wider the lens, the more facets you’d get in the image.

The picture at right shows a layout of colored construction paper photographed through my makeshift kaleidoscope. In the 1980’s, I thought this was really cool.

Fast forward to today

There are now software programs that will turn any photograph you have in your collection into myriad kaleidoscopic designs. The software I recommend is Filter Forge (filterforge.com). I’ve written about this program in past issues, but not in the context of kaleidoscope patterns.

Filter Forge gives you access to over 13,000 filters (really). Several of them are designed for different kinds of kaleidoscopic patterns. When you buy the program (it’s a one-time fee, not a subscription), you can search for various types of filters. For example, when you enter the keyword ‘kaleidoscope’ in the search box, you can choose one or all of the following:

GF Super Kaleidoscope Art Deco 2 - kaleidoscope Kaleidoscope Window Supreme Kaleidoscope Grungy Kaleidoscope Ornate Kaleidoscope Art Nouveau The Black and White Kaleidoscope Machine Kaleidoscope Kaleidoscopic Funky Kaleidoscope Kaleidoscopic Effects ... and there’s more

W i l d l i f e Babies Workshop August 20 - 24, 2020

One by one, you can download these plugin filters into your list of favorites within the program, and then they are available to you to manipulate any photo in your photo library. Each filter offers different kinds of kaleidoscopic interpretations of the original. Any kind of picture can be used -- nature, architecture, faces, abstracts, food, flowers, butterflies, etc. -- and the resulting patterns are always surprising and quite captivating.

Filter Forge works on either jpeg or tif files. If you store your images as psd files, as I do, the photographs you want to work on have to be converted to either of these two file formats first. I convert my psd files to tif.

Each plugin filter has several presets, and within each preset are sliders that give you amazing variations in what you can produce. The

names of the sliders don’t give you any clue as to what you’ll get. It would be impossible to describe, in two or three words, what kind of effect they create. You just have to experiment and see what happens. That’s part of the fun.

Truthfully, each photo can be turned into an infinite number of remarkable -- and different -- kaleidoscopic designs.

In the two shots above, you can see the original tree I shot on a foggy morning in the Western Sierras in California and just one of the kaleidoscopic designs I created from it. On the next page, I show the original landscape shot from the Eastern Sierras. The bottom two images are just two possiblities of the (literally) millions of designs you can create. The biggest problem you’ll have is limiting your output to just a few great images. §