As many of you know, I love to create mandalas on my light box using flowers. The idea behind Solar Rotation Mandala was to create a “solar system” circling the central sunflower (shown at the bottom of this story). The first image shown (below) is an LAB color L-channel inversion of the mandala as photographed on my light box. The flowers are all from my cutting garden, which is producing nicely this time of year!

The image on white (shown immediately below) was photographed with the Leica M11-P using the Leica Summilux -M 50mm f/1.4 Asph at f/16. With the camera on a tripod, I made eight exposures at ISO 64 and shutter speeds ranging from 1/8 of a second to ten seconds. I combined the exposures using a layer stack. Actually, I only used five of the eight exposures in the stack as I didn’t need outlying exposures on the darker side of the exposure histogram. 

The sunflower that is in the middle of the solar system mandala is shown below. It’s noted that this varietal, ‘Italian White’, has a pale, almost green look that is not the typical vibrant color of many sunflowers.