One of the most difficult photographic situations (shooting into the sun) can be conquered with hdr or one of the other techniques using blended images (DRI). Below are the 5 component images which were then combined and tone-mapped in Photomatix.

The images were obtained with autobracketing from -2 to +2 ev. Be sure to use Aperture Priority so that the dof does not change during bracketing.

Here are the Photomatix tone-mapping settings used…

Minor cleanup with levels and curves adjustment was then done in Photoshop. As a final touch I used Lucisart whyeth filter for detail enhancement with a low setting of 11 which didn’t change the overall lighting and tones of the image.