Ooh, I'd be glad to get some professional input on this topic as well. That's a gorgeous sunset, so it's a shame the bottom part didn't come out! Any ideas, anyone?
Well, that's just what happens when you shoot sunsets. You meter for the sky so the sky is properly exposed and the foreground will be dark or black. If you meter the foreground the foreground will be brighter, but now the sky will be blown out and overexposed. So in most cases you have to determine what part of the image is more important and expose for that and realize the rest of the image won't be exposed properly.
There is one way around this limitation and it's by using a GND (graduated neutral density) filter. These allow you to do some interesting things with blocking light from some of the scene (in your case the sky) while allowing more light in other parts of the scene to come through. This ultimately gives you a more evenly exposed image.
Since I use a point-and-shoot camera my option is to reduce the amount of ground and trees. Maybe by cropping or zooming in. I take quite a few pictures that have a silhoette when the daylight is limited and I do not want the ground to be the focus.
Oh, I forgot to add one more trick aside from a GND filter. You can take bracketed exposures and create an HDR image. This way you're capturing the full dynamic range that your camera can't in a single image.
Here's a sunset I took the other day with a little HDR to bring out the foreground. Without the extra exposures and processing the foreground was completely black but the sky looked great.
@marubozo --- I was just thinking maybe an hdr effect by adjusting the different contrasts using mutiple copies of the picture and then overlaying them would work too. Hmmm ... I've not tried this, yet.
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There is one way around this limitation and it's by using a GND (graduated neutral density) filter. These allow you to do some interesting things with blocking light from some of the scene (in your case the sky) while allowing more light in other parts of the scene to come through. This ultimately gives you a more evenly exposed image.
Here's a sunset I took the other day with a little HDR to bring out the foreground. Without the extra exposures and processing the foreground was completely black but the sky looked great.