As I found out, this is a very difficult time of day to photograph what you see with your eyes. The field in front of our book castle is filled with sunflowers during the summer months and I wanted to capture the idea of sunflowers past their prime as a "sunflower setting" to play off of the setting sun as reflected in the clouds. But I got one or the other: wilted sunflowers clearly depicted and sky blown out, or beautiful clouds and completely shadowed sunflower field.
@seanoneill -- I've heard of bracketing, and I think I tried it -- changing settings a step at a time to see which one works best? Or is there a different way I could have tried it?
@jyokota I'm not au fait with Canons but you should be able to set your camera up to take 3 or more shots at once where one exposes as you set the camera, 1 underexposes by a stop and 1 overexposes by a stop. Then you merge the shots in your processing software and this should help you create the correct levels of exposure for different parts of your shot. This is in effect HDR but you can process and still have the shot look natural. Shooting in RAW would also work and allow you to work with the shadows and recover specific colours.
Thanks for the tip! Now, to go out and practice . . .