I find that it is often a challenge to get a good exposure of stuff in
shadow because the camera's program assumes that humans are stupid,
and it wants to make everything it sees a nice bell-curve in the
center of the histogram. This picture was deliberately under-exposed
by 1-2/3 stops to more accurately reflect what the eye was seeing.

JD
Canon 1D-mkIII
EXIF Data Included
e-mail: blissful-wind(at)usa.net

Additional images at;
http://www.flickr.com/photos/john-pa/