What camera do I buy? / general gear talk

I was playing around yesterday, and was curious how to do things like this. I downloaded darktable based on a recommendation from here, can anyone link me to a guide on how to work on things like this?

With a matrix metered digital camera it's likely that the sky will be exposed about right to slightly over, and the ground will be under exposed. You'll need to bring up the exposure on the ground, whilst keeping the sky about the same or slightly bringing down the exposure.
You chiefly achieve this with the exposure, shadow, highlight, black and white sliders and probably the best way to learn is to play around with them yourself. Keep in mind that it's a bit of a juggling act at times, and moving one slider will mean you need to adjust another to compensate.

Probably easier to demonstrate if you've got a photo that needs working on ?

Here's one I did, shot straight into the sun. I started by upping the exposure by about a stop, and then further brought up detail in the ground by upping the shadow slider. To deal with the now blown out sky I placed a graduated linear filter across the top of the photo and dropped exposure on that part only by about a stop, and also dropped highlights by a good chunk. I then fiddled with whites and blacks to taste and added a slight vignette.

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