How to Get Sunrise and Sunset Pictures with a Canon 40D (or similar) Camera

This article is a cut and paste from a discussion on Flickr.

1. Set your camera to Av mode. f/8. (f/11 or f/13 work fine, too).
2. Set metering to "spot" (use the "[*] WB" button on the top and turn the TOP wheel until the graphic just below the 8.0 shows a solid dot in the middle of the square.
3. Put your camera on a tripod and point it in the direction you want for your shot. Set your "AF-Drive" (Drive) to 2-second delay.
4. Turn on LiveView - if your camera is set like mine, you can use the "Set" button in the middle of the back wheel. If not, you need to go to "Menu - Wrench **" (which has LCD brightness at the top and "LiveView" one line above "Flash control"). While you are there, turn Grid Display ON and Disable Silent shoot. The 50D uses a button in the upper left to enter LiveView mode.
5. Your 40D display will now look like all of the point and shoot cameras in the world (but you can smile because it's better!). You won't be able to look through the eyepiece, but you SHOULD notice a white box - most likely in the middle of the display.
6. Use the directional thumb "button" (above the big wheel at the back) to move the box up or down, right or left and put the box around your BRIGHTEST item (e.g. the sun). You can use the "zoom in" button to digitally zoom in 5x (press it again and you've zoomed 10x once more and you're back to regular view). If you accidentally press the thumb button in, the box returns to the middle. Annoying most of the time, but helpful once in a while.
7. Optionally turn OFF focus and use your zoomed view to focus on what YOU want to focus on.
8. With the white box around the "bright" part of your image partially depress your shutter button. Notice the exposure time in the lower left? That's what the camera thinks is the proper exposure for the bright thing. It's probably close. You may want to adjust your exposure "down" (darker) by dialing the big wheel to the left a click or two. (You did turn the camera ALL the way On, right? The exposure compensation [wheel] doesn't work if you turned it to the first on position.)
9. Take a picture.
10. Press the "Play" button and see what you get. My guess is the sky will look nice and colorful, but everything else will be dark. This will be your BEST exposure of the beautiful sky... but probably not your best exposure for the rest of the image. If things are peachy, you can get something like this:

yep. It's a bit boring. But it was hazy and it was taken about 10 minutes after sunset. The settings were f/9.0, 1/13th of a second, ISO 100.

or this ... note that this image is a composite of a sky shot and a foreground shot as described later.

NOW COMES THE TRICKY PART.

11. Either
(A) use Graduated Neutral Density filter to knock down the brightness of the sky OR
(B) take a second or third picture to adjust for the foreground. DON'T move the camera or change the focus or the f-stop! To get proper exposures for the darker areas move the white box around to those areas and let the camera calculate the exposure time. First try a "medium" darkness area. Then an even darker area. You'll notice the display will change rather dramatically when you move between light and dark areas as the camera in default mode will show a display that compensates by showing you *about* what the exposure will be. There are OTHER ways to do this, but I find this method gets better results than using AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing).

12. If you used option (B) then you'll have to use a program like PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro and/or Photomatix to combine your exposures into a single exposure. This is NOT easy to do well. You're doing an "HDR" in this case. The method for doing this is well described in an excellent book by Harold Davis called: The Photoshop Darkroom: Creative Digital Post-Processing

13. One last option here: wait until the sun has been down for 15 minutes and more. Now use a FLASH to illuminate your foreground. You will probably have to shoot this entirely in manual mode, but you could end up with a shot like this (hopefully you'll have a better looking person in your shot, though :-)

Once you get the hang of doing this all in Av mode, you will find it more convenient to learn how to do the same things in M (Manual) mode.

See also some excellent advice from other contributors:

BoldPuppy at al