I was taking a walk today with my daughter, and took some pics.
Please tell me: is there any other way to make pics like this work? Or is it only a HDR? I really hate a blown up sky...

[alohadave]

If the sky is blown out, then you won't be able to recover any details.

You don't necessarily need to do an HDR. You can take two pictures, one exposed like you have here, and one for the sky, then blend them together in your favorite image app. It can be tedious if you have a busy edge, but it is certainly possible.

Or you could use a Graduated Neutral Density filter to darken the sky enough to match the exposure with the ground.

[procyon]

Polarizing filter ?

[SCGushue]

Polarizing filter ?

No, not really effective in these situations. A polarizer would effectively work across the entire frame (in shadows, midtones and highlights) and not selectively as the OP would like to see a correction work.

Stephen

[Geekybiker]

You can do quite a bit in those shots if you expose for the sky and process for the shadows. Its going to require raw mode and playing with curves. I've been able to recover similarly blown skies out of raw files. If that doesn't do much, go into the blue channel and pull down the highlights alot in it. It may recover your sky.

[cputeq]

Agree. Your best bet is to either expose for the sky, or set your exposure meter to center weight and try to expose from a region which would show both extremes within the middle ~70% of the viewfinder.

I'm assuming this would work, of course, because I've never tried it

For instance, the single "dark" tree on the upper- left, last picture. Set camera to center weight, meter mostly off the sky with some dark tree in the scene to totally not lose the shadow, then shoot. Might just work

Of course, in these situations, bracketing and RAW mode is your friend.

[pentagor]

Thanks guys! I have some different exposed shots of the first one, and they are all in RAW. I will try these ideas and will post the result.
I just didn't have the tripod with me, to make a HDR.

[247nino]

you can try a grad ND filter ... it will stop down a portion of the frame (the sky) and give you HDR...

there are different GND filters with different intensities... try the darker ones for more stoppage!

[Joe_M]

Both pictures are a perfect example where taking multi-exposure images at +-2EV and combining them into an HDR file would solve your problems.

This is the kind of situation where HDRI shines.