My father was showing me a flower today in his garden. He has a bunch of yellow tulips (I think) and a single red one.

Annoyingly. it was close to a fence with really bad light for taking a picture – I know, I tried. There was lots of cross light and dense shadow because of a fence right behind the flower.

I was about to give up when I remembered I had my flash gun and off camera remotes with me and, never having used them outside the house before, it seemed like an opportunity to try some form of fill in flash.

OK, my understanding of “fill in flash” is that when you have a subject that’s back-lit or has a shadow on it, you can use a little “pop” of flash to compensate. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a compact or an SLR, if you can turn on your flash you can use it to help fill in the missing light. Using this, you can expose the image, front and back equally.

I guess I took it a little further, by using the flash off camera (with my father holding it) and deliberately under exposing the background I was able to mostly isolate the flower. A little photoshop later and I ended up with this.