Challenge #6: Bloom

My first commissioned work!  Ok, it wasn't really commissioned... my wife asked me to shoot a Gerbera Daisy with the possibility of hanging the shot in our newly renovated bathroom.  Not sure if it will ever make the 'hanging' stage, but I shot the daisy in my studio.  Ok, it's not really a studio, just a bunch of gear that I drag into our family room every once in a while and play with my Nikon D300S or even my D80.  I needed to practice a little bit more with Nikon's Creative Lighting System so I used two SB-600's and the on camera flash as a commander to drive the two Speedlights.  I wanted as much control over the shot as I could get, so I used the amazing Nikon 70-200mm F/2.8 lens to give me a very shallow depth of field.

So, the original shot was the orange daisy.  I messed with it in Photoshop and replicated it a couple of times, each in a different color.  The current version is the last one I completed before I got bored.

I tried to print this on a large format (17x34") on my Epson Stylus Pro 3800 printer.  I continue to have problems with this printer and have lost confidence that it will work flawlessly every time I press print on my Mac.  In this case, it printed all of the orange daisy and about an inch of the blue one then it stopped.  The display panel said printing and the green light flashed away like it was doing something, but other than that, the printer was silent.  The Mac printer toaster poped up with the now familiar and very frustrating Communication Error and that was that.  Another print screwed.  More ink and paper wasted.  More nasty words. 

At least I was able to salvage 'something' from this print.  I ended up cutting the orange daisy off of the print (about 11x17") and giving it to my daughter.  I printed this on InkPress Luster paper.  The portion of the print that worked actually looked pretty nice!  It's a shame the Epson couldn't finish the job.  Maybe I'll try printing to the Epson from my PC and see if there's more success there.  Now onto the next challenge...