New Flower

We bought this orchid months ago when it had some nice flowers, they lasted a few weeks and then died and fell off. Now months later it has sent out a new shoot with some new flowers.

I was trying to get this shot as a white flower on white background, but so far cannot get the lighting at the front and the back of the image to balance the way I want, using the auto flash on the camera gives an over exposed washed out image, so I slowly reduced the flash power by simply holding a piece of tissue paper in front of the flash, and then folding it up to double its thickness, and so on until I got a reasonable shot. Think I need some more work on this technique to really get it right