Butterflies are surely some of nature's most beautiful creatures, delicate, with magnificent colours and graceful in their silent flight. But they are not only beautiful, they pollinate the flowers that would be so much poorer without butterflies.

It is a perfect symbiosis, the butterflies are the flowers' best friends!

With such thoughts in mind, I searched for a photographic solution to realise this symbiosis pictorially. Just as the pair of butterfly wings is strictly symmetrical, the flowers on their wings should reflect this symmetry in the finished picture.

It was a long way to get there.

A large number of suitable flowers and plants had to be photographed in the studio as macro shots under controlled lighting conditions.

The fascinating exotic butterflies were taken from a natural science collection that was built up under strict observance of species protection.

The combination of both elements, flowers and butterflies, was achieved after lengthy experiments by means of elaborate layer techniques in the photo software used.

This creative act distinguishes the series Les beaux amis des fleurs from all butterfly images known to the author and unites the beauty of the butterflies with the beauty of the flowers to create unique photographs.

A YellowKorner favourite known for his photos of abandoned spaces, the famous German photographer Bernhard Hartmann is now back with a very different project. He has created a series of collages using flowers arranged to depict butterflies. All of these "beautiful friends of flowers", as he calls them, are staged and shot against a black background which contrasts with the vibrant colours of the iconoclastic butterflies.