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As an aging hippie, I suppose it is only right that I have been accepted into a juried show at the 1650 Gallery in Los Angeles titled "Flower Power." One of the lasting iconic photographs of that time (and there are many) is of a beautiful young hippie girl placing a flower in the upturned barrel of a rifle being held by a National Guardsman. The power of the flower and earnest social protest has not dimmed over time as evidenced by recent events in the Middle East and, now, the Western world.

The image chosen for this exhibit is one of my early scanner pieces titled "Phormium 2." It was composed directly on the glass of my flatbed scanner, using Dahlia blossoms and the buds from a Phormium plant in my backyard. Using the arc of the buds as a repeating element that holds the composition together, I was conscious of feeling like a painter and laying down brushstrokes. It is one of my favorite images from that period of time.

I discovered the process of making images with a flatbed sc ...