What do you do if the sun is in the picture you want, but if you increase the shutter speed, (because of the high amount of light) the foreground appears to dark! If i decrease the shutter speed to make the foreground brighter, the sun is to bright and makes the whole sky (including the clouds, which in allot of cases are very important in a picture) a big white blob! HELP!

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With film you use a graduated neutral density filter to even out the extreme contrast in lighting. Check out Galen Rowell's website; he was an expert at that technique. If you are using digital then you can use a technique called HDR which allows you to blend frames from the exact same scene into one image. It works very well to overcome the differences in contrast that the natural scene exhibits.

Shooting into the sun is never a good idea. Lens flare and/or the shape of your lens diaphragm - or both - in the picture will usually result. If you must shoot under those conditions a lens hood can help. A graduated ND filter to decrease exposure of the sun may help.

As has already been suggested Neutral Density graduated filters can be used. A polarising filter will hold back the shy and direct sunlight, but only by 2 stops, and pointing at the light the last thing you want to do is add glass that will reflect internally within the lens system. So the only thing left is 'Bracketing' shots, if your camera can do it. The technique is to take a number of frames (3, 5 or even 7 frames in extreme conditions) altering the shutter speed (not the aperture as you want the same Depth of Field in each shot) by 2 stops or so between them. Some of the shots will be at a slow shutter speed so a tripod is essential. Once you have your shots you can merge them together in Photoshop, but a better software is PhotomatixPro;- http://www.hdrsoft.com/ In their user gallery there are examples of the shot you talk about. (plus some of mine) Chris