You hit the nail square on the head with the grad filter comment. With digital it is more sensitive to the highlights than print film is, more like slide film. I would think that Misha can probably explain that better than I can. Other than a grad filter, you can do two things (and this is possibly where people will not agree with all that I say)it is possible to compensate up to 2 stops of under exposure, as there is detail recorded to work with, where as with the blown highlights there is no detail there to work with. Therefore you need to expose for the highlights, to preserve the detail, and then bring up the shadows with post work. What you do will be partly determined by the software that you have to work with. If you have curves you may be able to recover shadows with that, even better is the levels function if you have it. If you have the ability to use adjustment layers then you can select the darker area and adjust the exposure in the selected section. Even better if you have Elements 3 it has the highlight and shadow tool that will recover shadows to an extent unless it is very bad. The other method is more complex and maybe controversial. Taking two shots, one for the shadows and one for the highlights and blending the correctly exposed highlights with the correctly exposed shadows. Dont know haw much you know, so I will leave it at that for now

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