Happy New Years everyone!

I haven’t posted in a while, and its high time I did. This past year has been filled with distractions—I got married to Bobbi Lane, traveled to Greece and Turkey, and had a very intense (but happy) holiday season. So… now back to work! To start off this new year, I’m introducing a new monthly feature for the blog, called Mandala of the Month – This month I’ve done an animated Mandala, created from several individual photo-mandalas— here’s the video:

Here is the “seed” image from the opening mandala:

Mandala Seed Image

The original seed image was shot at the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum

Duplicating, flipping, rotating, pasting and re-sizing to create a bi-lateral mirror image in Photoshop yields:

Seed Mirrored and Squared

The result after some simple Photoshop manipulations

This image is duplicated into a new layer, then rotated 90º and set to Overlay to yield:

Photo-Mandala

The finished photo-mandala

This is what the layer stack looks like

Mandala Layers

The layer stack showing the rotated Background copy in Overlay mode

I examine the creation of photo-mandalas in Photoshop in more detail in this older post:

How To – The World of Photo-Mandalas

You can have a lot of fun with photo-mandalas, but certain images work much better than others. I have spent quite a bit of time experimenting with this and now I even shoot specifically to create a photo-mandala image. I will be sharing new photo-mandalas every month, and showing you how they evolve from the original seed images. Until next time—keep capturing pixels, and have fun organizing them into images!