Sunset on the Factory

I looked out my window one night last week to the most beautiful palette of colors in the sky while the sun was setting over the sugar beet factory in my backyard. I literally SPRINTED up the stairs and grabbed my camera/tripod to capture the vivid colors. The scene in the pictures below was gone after about 10 minutes.  I live in a beautiful place!

First, I tried doing a panorama. I have my beginning photo class stitch together panoramas for one of their first photo assignments. I used 4 different pictures to form the panorama below - click on it to see a larger version.


Secondly, I tried doing two different HDR composites with 6 different images each.  HDR works well for things that don't move.  These clouds moved millimeters while I was taking all of the different shots so when I tried to merge the HDR images in photoshop the clouds look all blurry and dumb each time I tried.  Any suggestions on what to try to make this work better in the future?

Lastly, here is a picture where I tried just backlighting the sugar beet factory with the sunset so that the shape of the factory was blacked out but the sunlight showed the shape of the spire. I did this by closing my aperture up tight - I also did this so my depth of field would be clear and in focus too.