OK, my question: (someone tried to answer it before, but I feel I need more info)
How do I take pictures of flowers on sunlight without overexposing parts of it?
Or: how do I take pictures of flowers in direct sunlight without making it look flat?
and... define "flat"?
The problem you're having here is that direct sunlight is harsh. It's a small light source, like a bare flash head with a reflector (any general speed light with no modifier basically), and small light sources produce hard light.
Hard light is light that is focused and creates defined, hard edged shadows.
When you have an object that has texture, hard light is going to cause portions that aren't directly facing that light source to quickly be covered in shadows, having only smaller portions of that object exposed to the main light with others underexposed in the shadows.
To take photos of flowers in direct sunlight, you would need a fill flash, reflector, or some other light source to help illuminate the rest of the flower to be closer to the correct exposure of the parts of the flowers that are in direct sun light.
That's if you're shooting when it's sunny and cloudless.
Flat = a very even exposure lacking contrast.
A dynamincally lit exposure:
A flat exposure:
The first photo has a lot of contrast between the shadows and the highlight where the second photo is pretty much evenly lit all the way across the board with the only variances coming from the light from the sun and the shadows across the back wall.
When it's cloudly outside, the clouds act like a giant softbox. They turn the sun from a small light source into a huge light source. The light from the sun hits the clouds and reflects bouncing around on everything and creating very soft, vague shadows.
If you're photographing flowers in these conditions, they're most likely going to be evenly lit without and big contrast variations creating a flat exposure. To combat this, you can do editing in PhotoShop or create your own dynamic light. A reflector would be less effective in this scenario, so using a flash as the key (or main) light and underexposing the the ambient by a stop or three would create a dynamic lighting setup. With a setup like this, you're going to want to use a modifier like an umbrella, that diffuses the light giving it a nice soft shadow, so you're not getting the hard edges.
And remember this, the smaller the light source, the harder the light and shadows it creates. So as you increase the size of the light source, you make the light softer and the shadows softer.
