The image “Patterning the Continuum” was inspired by my discovery of a photo on the Wikimedia commons posted by a Wikimedia contributor named Lamiot. The light globe at the center of the image, with the illuminated region surrounding it, suggested the possibility that the pattern of a Fibonacci Spiral could be imposed on the scene, centered on the light globe.

Original Lamiot photo

The Ornate Tile, a nearly-square baroque carpet pattern, seemed an ideal choice for generating the spiral.

Square carpets are rare, but this one was close enough to use — the ratio of sides was 1:0.967. I was able to abstract a one-eighth slice of the pattern from a photo of the carpet, normalize it, and then repeat it eight times to produce the full 600×600 pattern:

The original was more or less a five-color design, but I needed a three-color (red-green-blue) template to run the standard process used to create tiles and chromatized designs. It was necessary to finesse the ochre tones to fit into the red-green range of the template. The end result was the Ornate Tile:

First the RGB template…

Then apply the “Indra shift”…

To make the final tile.

To chromatize the Lamiot photo with an imposed Fibonacci spiral, the first requirement is to reduce the image to grayscale:

Lamiot photo in grayscale

Each pixel in a grayscale image represents a digital value between 0 and 255, from black to white. These coded values allow a brightness coefficient to be assigned to each point in the original photo, so that sections of color may be masked off and abstracted, and then reassigned with different color values where appropriate.

Next a Fibonacci spiral base is created using the Ornate template, with its center in the middle of the light globe:

Fibonacci spiral base

Now we begin a sequence of masking operations, in which selected sections of the image are masked off. Then the Fibonacci spiral base undergoes a color transformation within the separated section.

We begin with the area immediately adjacent to the light globe:

Mask #1

Next come the tree branches and leaves on both sides of the light. The sky behind them is masked off and shifted to darker and bluer tones:

Mask #2

Now the red light pole is masked off and added in:

Mask #3

The fourth mask overlays the branches, with their different levels of brightness and color tones:

Mask #4

An artificially created light globe, somewhat larger than the real one, is laid in by the fifth mask:

Mask #5

The final mask heightens the brightest tones of the leaves and the branches to match more closely the contrasts seen in the original photo.

This is the finished image:

(Click to enlarge)