Motif: topography - sheepscape WITH YET ANOTHER REPOST

I just got back a bunch of slides from Chas' STL workshop in Jasper and have only begun to sort through them. A common theme seems to be animals climbing steep hills or standing on top of them.

I had much higher hopes for the results of an evening on top of this knoll north of Jasper after the workshop had ended. The light on the background landscape was wonderful. The first group of shots had the background blown out while the sheep were sharp, posing wonderfully, and exposed very well. A GND might have helped, but the animals were often directly in front of the blown out parts. Then as the light diminished I pulled out the flash, and don't like what it did to the eyes and foreground grasses.

Canon Elan 7, 28-135 IS, probably Velvia 100, flash at about -1.5. I'm interested in what you would have done differently in this situation. Thanks!

Edit: Wow, a lot of people have really put a lot of effort into this. I really struggled with the colors before the first posting, and thought I was going color blind. I just deleted a few iterations of my reposts because I saw that the guidelines limit reposts to 2. OK, Jeff, I'll figure out duplicate layers soon. The sky was a pinkish lavender that night, and everything seemed to have that cast. It seemed like the easiest thing to do about that misbehaving grass was to mow it down with the clone tool.