How to make foreground lighter with very bright background?

Today I was helping my sister take pictures of the sun. It was easy to get the sun in the picture, but then everything in front of it went black from the bright background. Is it possible to get good exposure on the foreground at sunset?

I was using the Nikon D40x.

Here's kind of an example of what happened:
In the example, the coast is black from the sun. Is there a way to be able to have the coast actually shown without editing afterwards?

Wow. That's a hard picture to take. Is there any information in that dark foreground at all? If there's you could try to select it and lighten it or increase the contrast in it selectively. My guess is there's not much and the only way to take this photo would have been with a lens filter made for that purpose.

Either move and use a different angle or change the aperture.
You can't really edit light in afterward, well you can, but because it didn't get the details when you took it, you're not going to be able to lighten it and see them.

I like the shot and wouldnt want detail on the land…

in camera there's no way to get the shaddow and highlight areas at the same exposure for that image,

you can either do hdr (youtube: photography hdr photos), or you can shoot two exposures, one expose for the sun, the other expose for the land, then clone them together in processing

Your camera is doing exactly what it is suppose to do.

The sun is so much brighter than the shadow side of any object, all you will get is silhouette.

If you were shooting a subject that was within ten feet of the camera you could use a flash to fill in the shadow cast by the sun, but not a whole mountain

My guess is that one of you need to take a class in photography so you know what you can and can't expect your camera to do

The only real way to do it is to take 2 images at differnt exposures and then clone the land bit in photoshop and superimpose it onto the image using the lassoo tool