Dealing with sunlight that making the subject darker. Wildlife

Update:

I'm interested in what others will say.
but....

Raise the exposure, it will overexpose the background while better exposing the bird. That sometimes helps to isolate the subject from the background
I wonder if a polarizing filter will help- it can be rotated to eliminate most of the reflections off the water, which are creating a lot of the brightness in the image.
Can you go at another time, when the sun is at a different angle?
Inside a building, I've used "fill flash" to brighten a subject in front of a window. I haven't gotten close enough to a critter that I think it would work

See if your camera supports bracketing. This allows you to shoot 3 frames at your fastest capture rate back to back. You can set bracketing exposure to +1 stop difference between each exposure. Depending on your camera and controls for bracketing you can set your camera to expose the first shot at normal, the second at +1 and the third at +2. If your subject doesn't move you will have 3 identical shots with different exposures. You can use merge techniques to produce the final print.

If you shoot Nikon you can use Active-D-lighting which will perform in camera HDR rendering that preserves shadow and highlight detail. The benefit of this approach is it requires 1 frame making it useful for all subjects.

Some cameras have DRO which is dynamic range optimization which is similar if not the same as Active-D lighting.

Canon likely has an equivalent mode but I am not familiar with your cameras.

In these situations I use a Canon Speedlite to provide fill-in flash to the bird. Even if the Speedlite is just mounted on the hot shoe rather than off-camera, I find it worthwhile.

If the bird remains in the same position in relationship to the bright BG, I experiment by dialing in -ve Exposure Compensation for the ambient light to tone down the background, and some -ve Flash Exposure Compensation so the bird is not over-flashed.

Here is an example with a heavily back lit Grebe.

Cheers

Dennis

okay thanks. Pretty sure the canon supports bracketing + and - values. I think the other photo of this blue heron in my gallery was taken using AV setting and when zoomed in it appears to look quite good and no post processing with software. It looks like zooming in at 200mm helped the lighting somehow. I'm guessing the light meter metered more of the bird and less background. Same blue heron same lens. Canon 70-200 F4 I'm very sure I'm doing something wrong with settings when light is behind the subject.
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Get a better beamer. I have one and while I only use it sporadically, it has always given me good results.

I have thought of buying the 70-200 L 2.8 IS Only because my 70-200 L F4 with no image stabilization is a walk around favorite. Its AF locks focus on extremely well 98-99% of the time.
With ideal conditions including me doing my part correctly I have been getting some nice photos. The sun interference and how to deal with it is totally my fault not any lens at all. I have some pretty nice lenses that cost a me chunk of money. My other quality lenses respond to harsh sunlight behind the subject the same way. I'll experiment with the exposure compensation, and add +1 EV to brighten the shot, or -1 EV to darken the shot. Maybe bring a note pad and pen with me to document the time of day and lighting conditions.

Did you mention which metering mode you are in? And what mode was the camera in.... Aperture or shutter preferred, automatic, or one of the scene modes? That will dramatically sway how the cameras sees the scene. What ever mode it is, don't use anything that isn't close to being spot metering. Anything like evaluative... you'll get these issues.