Sometimes nature plays games with us as far as the light goes. No one has of yet developed a camera that can take two different exposures at the same time to capture two extremely different levels of light. Oh, yeah, you could use graduated neutral density filters and such to even out exposures. Sometimes that works when the lighting is only a stop or so different across the top or bottom half of an image. But when the light range gets up there where the top half of the image is a great deal brighter than the bottom half, well, the best way to make the capture is to take two shots then blend them in postprocessing.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. The top half of this photo required a rather strong exposure to prevent over exposing it as the sky was quite bright. However, the bottom half was in shadow with barely enough light to illuminate it. What I did was to take two photo's with the camera on a tripod, one exposure for the top half not caring what the bottom looked like, which was black in this case, then another photo exposing for the bottom half which washed out the top portion.
In post processing, I simply opened both images and overlaid the second image with the first one. Using the eraser tool toned down to something like 50% opacity, I erased the overexposed dark bottom half which exposed the layer underneath, then merged the two layers. A little tweaking of the overall image, and, well you see the results.
When the lighting is tough, well, take two!
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