Time Killer
When I started playing with fractals a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the program I began playing with was a DOS program called FractInt. It is still around. It is anachronistic in so many ways in the days of fancy user interface Windows applications. FractInt still runs in DOS and people are still playing with it. And not just playing. While FractInt has some issues concerning maximum image size, color depth, etc, it is still a very useable program and offers probably more fractal equation types and variations than any other program.


Sixfold
A trip to download.com or macdownload.com (for Mac users) will turn up a fair number of fractal programs of the freeware or shareware variety, including FractInt. This is a great place to start playing with fractals to see if it has any appeal to you.

Creation

The thing with fractal programs is that you can use the output directly as art, or feed it into your existing image library as yet another source of content to be combined, manipulated, edited, collaged, etc to create the end result that you want. It is all in your control. There are fractal artists who will not manipulate the rendered output from whichever fractal program they use. I am not one of them. At the very minimum I will manipulate a fractal image in Photoshop as I would a photograph. Often I will combine several of them together or combine fractal images with photographs to create a composite image. For me, anything goes that lets me create the image I see in my head.