I bet you liked the scene the way your eyes saw it. However as you can see from the picture, your eyes and the camera are not the same. Top half of the picture is too bright, especially the sun is overexposed dramatically. And the bottom half is simply black. For the next time, get a tripod and shoot 2-3 pictures of the same frame with different exposure settings to get a good exposure for the light and dark regions. Then use a photo editor (photoshop, the gimp, etc.) to blend the different exposures into a single shot. If you don't have the chance to do this, the following works too: Pick the most important object in your frame, and lock the exposure to it. Shoot one image, and make it sure that your light source (here, the sun) does not overexpose. Then, fire up your photo editor, go to google.com, learn how to do "Digital ND (or neutral density) Filtering" with your editor, and do it. This way you will fix the exposure in different regions of your shot and blend them together. I attached a sample fix, this added some noise to the picture because of the big difference between top-and-bottom exposures, but you get the idea.