What dreams are made of

I was introduced to the Deep Dream Generator website a long time ago, but I have never really gotten to mess around with it because I have always been too busy.

Over the past day or so, I have been playing around on there with some of my photography and I have been making some pretty cool images.

So what is the Deep Dream Generator?

Well, it is basically a computer program that takes an image, then combines it with another image, runs some nerdy algorithms on them to mesh them together and combine the two images into one final image that comes out that is either the stuff of dreams or nightmares.

The image above is a combination of one of my shots from the tulip festival couple months ago combined with a background from a website that I subscribe to for licensed material. I couldn't think of a cool name for it, so I used a name generator for art work and came up with the title "Scene with Silent Dimension". I thought that kind of sounded cool and sort of symbolic to entering the dream world.

So this next one I have titled "Dream of Nightmare?". It is one of those things that looks kind of cute and cuddly on the surface because you see some puppies, but the more you look at it, the more weird it gets. WTF is that dog caterpillar in the bottom left doing? And is the center of the flower a black hole eating all of the puppy heads? Then there is a dog headed inch worm or something on the left hand of the flower.

To achieve this monstrosity, I didn't combine two images. This was the result of using one of my flowers and then the "Deep Dream" function. I guess this is a more intense algorithm that does some weird stuff to it, and then you can opt to "go deeper" into the dream and run the process multiple times increasing the intensity and effects. Mine was the result of two iterations.

There really isn't an undo function on the site, so I didn't want to go deeper and have some totally jacked up image come out. You are also limited on how many images you can create a day since they say the process is so intensive on their machines.

I had fun making these, and I am looking forward to making some more with different themes to them. I will be collecting different style of backgrounds to use, going through my photos and thinking of new styles of photography that would make some cool Dream Art.

I hope you all got a kick out of looking at my pictures I made. If you have some time, you should check out Deep Dream Generator and create some of your own. It is pretty fun. If you make some, drop a link to yours in the comments here so I can check it out.