Had trouble shooting these. The sky was blown, so I metered for the sky (on my Panasonic G1). Then used fill-flash at about -1EV to illuminate the pony sufficiently. This gave a good exposure sky with nice exposure pony.
They are wild(ish) Pembrokeshire ponies that graze on the coast path. They are a bit skittish, so I had to wait a few minutes until they came up to me (an apple helped!) They wouldn't let me get close enough so I flipped out the tilt screen and shot them semi-blind hoping that the framing was right. they didn't seem to mine the flash, even though it was less than three feet from them.