Nigel, photography question:

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Keep going back, patience is one of the most important skills a photographer can develop. That's one nobody seems to mention, but even the greatest shooters get maybe 1 in 4 usable shots and that's on a good day (keep in mind, usable is a relative term).

If you don't want to repeatedly travel there, you can always practice shooting in similar conditions and when you figure out how you want to do it you can actually go there and shoot it.

Got it.  I'll learn the menu first, and then just try everything.

That is totally the way to go.

I was visualizing the sun as setting behind the mountains, but now that I know it's the opposite, I think that the problem you're having is largely that you're shooting a distance landscape in low light. In addition to using a landscape setting, a tripod, or even just steadying the camera on your car, might make a world of difference.

Also, what TTM said. Not all of your shots are going to turn out under the best of circumstances.

If you want a decent film camera, and don't mind going with something vintage, the old Minoltas are really nice and inexpensive. I'd buy one from a vintage camera store, though, or be prepared to buy several, have one turn out decent, and part the rest out. Even if you go that route you could put together a really nice kit for about $200.

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You might consider making a string tripod for low-light shots too:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2146191_make-string-tripod.html

[Triple Zero]

Nice thing about digital is, it doesn't cost you anything but time to shoot lots of pictures. I'd recommend just shooting on all of the different settings and seeing what it does. Best way to learn is to fuck around. You probably can't seriously screw anything up on a camera like that and even if you can there should be a "factory reset" or "default settings" option somewhere in there.

That I could do.

Especially with the antique piece of shit I have.

Only problem is, you only get the weird display for about 15 minutes.

If you have a digital camera, 15 minutes is ample time to shoot like 100 pictures.

When you get back home, load them into your computer, on the first pass you just throw away all the obviously bad ones. If it's slightly motion blurred or something else wrong, dump it. Second pass, pick out the obvious really good ones. The not bad/not good ones are for looking at the next day with a fresh eye. Then throw away the rest.

Also, if the colours aren't right, you can adjust them on the computer. I used to think this as cheating, but really it's not. After all, the digital camera also tries to automatically adjust the colour levels when you take the picture, in order to make it appear the way you see it. But it doesn't always get this right. That's what TTM means with RAW mode, then the camera does not apply these auto adjustments, so you can do them manually by eye on the computer later on.

But even if your camera does not have a RAW mode, you can still adjust the colour levels afterwards, even if the camera also has made auto adjustments.

For software to adjust digital photographs, Adobe PhotoShop is the natural choice. But you want to get a pirated version, because unless you're a professional, it's just too damn expensive (worth it IMO, but still). The other option is to get the opensource GIMP, which can do nearly everything PhotoShop can do, except a bit more clunky or something.

There are lots of excellent tutorials online with step-by-step screenshots on how to make colour adjustments in GIMP or PhotoShop. Very useful, and IMO a LOT of fun to play around with.

try
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=gimp+digital+photography+levels

"levels" is just one of the many keywords to look for. one of the colour adjustment commands (in both GIMP and PhotoShop) is called "Levels".