This week, I’m participating in a new Photography meme, a Weekly Photo Challenge hosted by my good friend and client, Aric Hoek, who runs the Pro Photo Business Forum. He’s an amazing photographer and a generous spirit. His site aims to help amateur photographers learn, improve, and effectively turn their talent into a successful business.

This first challenge is using Fill Flash. You can see the challenge here and participate if you want – there’s still time this week!

You can really increase the quality of your photography with the right amount of fill flash. Fill flash will help to resolve this problem for you. This weeks assignment; use flash to illuminate your backlit subject.

Here’s my submission for this challenge:

I had her back to the sun and, as you can tell from the blown areas of the photo, the sun was high in the sky so her face was in full shadow. I used my SB-900 flash on a tripod slightly to the right (behind me) with the diffuser and filled those shadows, giving a natural light source feeling instead of a hard flash result. I am not a fan of on camera flash and have very little experience using my SB-900 so this is really good practice for me! I’m glad Aric chose this as the first assignment and can’t wait to find out how I can improve my technical skill.

Special thanks to my awesome model (and daughter) for getting all dolled up to help me with this assignment! You rock, pretty girl!