Why does this happen?

[suzbaby]

I am trying to take pictures of landscape at sunset and the sky comes out bright and beautiful, but the landscape below comes out completely in shadow if not black.
How can I avoid this?

Here's an example (just a quick one from my front porch last night):

[DS1]

1. It's simply a matter of how much your sensor can deal with

If you focus on the land, and then move up to get the sky, you'll probably get green trees but blown out sky. There's ways around it with post-processing, filters, and things like that. But if you have an SLR, try the auto-bracket feature. It might get you a more usable shot.

[suzbaby]

4. Thank you! (nt)

[regnaD kciN]

2. The simple answer...

...is that cameras, whether they be film or digital, can handle a much lower contrast range than the human eye. In other words, where we see shades of light or dark tonality, the camera will see whites or blacks. That's why, for example, although flowers may look beautiful to the human eye in sunlight, to photograph flowers well, you generally need a cloudy day.

If you have a DSLR, the usual way to handle this is to get a graduated neutral-density filter (a square or rectangular filter going from gray to clear -- you can get them with various levels of dark gray from a source like Cokin) and position it in the filter holder that screws onto your lens so that the gray portion covers the bright part of the image and the clear portion the darker part. This cuts down the contrast so both the lighter and darker parts of the image will fall within the camera's contrast range.

For an example of what I'm talking about, look at my thread of Mount Rainer shots from last week. Photo #3 was taken without such a filter. Notice how much darker the reflection of the mountain in the lake is from the mountain itself. Photo #4, on the other hand, was shot with a 2-stop graduated neutral-density filter covering the upper part of the image down to the forest on the other side of the lake. Notice that, this time, the mountain and its reflection are almost equal in brightness.

Another technique is called "HDR" (high dynamic range) photography. Using a tripod to keep the camera in the same place, you shoot five different exposures of the scene one-stop apart in exposure, and then blend the images together using software. (My entry in the summer contest is an HDR image.) It's a bit difficult to explain in detail, but you can find some tutorials online if you search for "hdr photography." I find most HDR images to look exaggerated and unbelievable, but there are times when it's the only way to remotely capture a scene.

[suzbaby]

3. Thanks for the explanation.

Your Mt. Rainer photos are beautiful.