Repeating patterns

A sempervivum plant patiently sits before my camera, looking absolutely stunning with its repeating patterns, beautiful colors, and with its fuzzy thingies all over the place. How can I do it justice? How can I photograph it without insulting it? For the next couple of days I'm going to give it a try. Here are a few examples. All were taken with a 100mm macro lens set on aperture priority (AV) with shutter speeds ranging from 1 second to 2.5 seconds, ISO 400. I normally would shoot this at ISO 100, but wanted to go with shorter shutter speeds this session, figuring whatever grain/noise resulted would be camouflaged by the fuzzy nature of the plant. Some of the shots were purposely underexposed by 2/3 of a stop so that the lighter-colored spikes wouldn't be overexposed. ©Carol Leigh