A couple of weeks ago, I spent a lovely couple of afternoons with my studio lights, a black velvet background, a couple of bouquets of flowers from the grocery store, and of course, my camera.  The weather was dreadful outside but my attention was fully focused on some luscious red tulips, some pale lavender daisies, and one very large daisy. I rarely, if ever, photograph a whole group of flowers, preferring instead to focus attention on one individaul flower, one part of that flower, or a unique perspective. It is intriguing, I find, to be able to show the flower in ways that we don’t typically experience it.

The large daisy was more like a white sunflower, about 5 inches across and a big puffy green center.  I’d never seen a daisy or sunflower exactly like this one. Since it was a grocery store bouquet, I couldn’t ask anyone what it was.  Online sleuthing hasn’t yielded an identification yet but I’ll keep looking. I didn’t take the images with the intention of using them for mandalas and I’ve yet to totally explore all the images I created in those afternoons.  When I was thinking about mandalas, though, I thought I’d see what would emerge from one of the daisy/sunflower images.

The re-imagined sunflowers from a few weeks ago were brought to mind when these mandalas emerged.  Easy one seems to be a completely new flower.  The quality of light, so different than what would normally occur in the garden, accentuates and defines the petals.  Normally, I don’t post all the mandalas that are created from an image, but I truly couldn’t chose favorites this time.  They were all intriguing and beautiful to me.  Do you have a favorite?  (Don’t forget that you can click on any image and it will enlarge so that you can better see all the details.)