Breaking one of my own rules

It’s usually correct to avoid shooting subjects in the shade when the background is sunny.  I rarely break my own rule on this, but in this case I loved the blue color of the flowers and wanted to capture that.  However, the time of day, as well as the position of the flowers against the background, gave me no choice.  The only way to make this kind of lighting situation work is to (1) shoot in RAW mode and (2) move the highlights and shadows sliders in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom to their extreme positions.  In other words, I moved the highlights slider all the way to the left which toned down the bright sunny background as much as possible, and I moved the shadows slider all the way to the right and that opened up the dark shadows -- the flowers-- to the maximum.  For this picture, I used the new Canon 100-400mm lens which remarkably can focus as close as about two feet from the subject at 400mm.  My settings for this were 1/1000th of a second (because there was a slight breeze and I was hand holding the lens), f/11, and 1600 ISO.