Contrast

The way you deal with harsh contrast, as in this midday picture of an abandoned car in the Namib desert in Namibia, is to (1) shoot in RAW mode, and (2) work with the shadow and highlight sliders in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) or Lightroom in post-processing.  You need to lighten the shadows and darken the highlights in the picture.  In this way, you will bring the scene back to what you saw with your eyes. This shot is especially contrasty because the sun was behind the car, but using just those two controls -- the shadows slider and the highlights slider -- I was able to mitigate the contrast gain which is typical of digital images.