There’s plenty of reasons to photograph during the so called ‘golden hour’ (which sadly not always lasts an hour). The colour is warm, the shadows are beautiful and, because the sun is already low, it brings out texture.
For small flash users, there’s an even better reason: a hotshoe flash is not very powerful compared to the sun. But that ratio gets better once the intensity of the sun diminishes.
In this picture, this allowed me to set the exposure for the sky, making sure I did not loose detail there. I positioned the three main subjects so that their faces were still being a little ‘rim-lit’ by the slowly setting sun, which also threw a nice, very three-dimensional shadow to the front. You can see that effect in the picture below. I’d like to tell you that I made it especially for instructional purposes, but the truth is that I forgot to turn on my flash 
I then brought their exposure up by using an SB-900 from the front. The flash was triggered by the on-camera flash of the D90. A lot of Nikon cameras have this nifty feature.
The picture below is the out-of camera picture. Because Mrs. MoreThanWords directed the flash towards the faces, the picture is still a little dark around the engine part of the motorcycle. I tweaked it to the final result by cropping in Lightroom and then throwing in a couple of Nik Viveza Control Points.
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Nice pic but I think your B/W wins.
I presume you set the exposure manually for the background, how did you set the flash output<
@ Alan: it really depends, both for the foreground and the background. Sometimes I work in Nikon’s iTTL, most of the time in Aperture Priority, and with a EV compensation for the background of about -1 (although I sometimes set the background exposure manually). For the flash, I either use the aforementioned iTTL or manual mode. Especially when the sun is quite bright, I start from full power and dial that down when needed. One very handy tool to have for evaluating the correctness of the ambient / flash mix on your camera LCD when you’re working in bright light is a Hoodman Hoodloupe. Highly recommended!