blown-out whites

I'm sure this is common with newbies, but every time I try to take egret pictures, even in late afternoon light and even with ISO set at 100 and aperture at smallest, the whites are still blown out. I suppose it has something to do with the automatic white background setting on the menu, but does this have to be set each time? And how do you set it???

It's more to do with overall exposure,.

They are difficult subjects,. I rarely even try to get them during harsh near noon light.

Try setting your camera to "Partial" metering so that the exposure is more suited to your subject, and just keep checking historgrams. The LC display mey not show you everything, but it will show blown highlights, on a bird like that depnding on how close you are, you will have to dial in some - exposure compensation. Your LCD hystogram and "blinkies" will tell you how mucg -EC is needed for a given circumstance.

I have trouble seeing a decent pic on the LCD in sunlight due to brightness and due to needing glasses for closeup! But can't wear glasses for focusing camera or seeing an egret in the distance. What I really need is to be 25 years younger. Can you do that??

If the sun is shining on any part of the egret, try setting your exposure compensation dial to something like from -2/3 to -1 1/3 stop. Check the histogram and adjust the EC for more or less exposure. You may end up darkening the rest of the scene just to get a properly exposed egret but at least you can correct that in post processing. With a blown white subject, there's no way to get the details back so it's better to err on the side of under exposing the background instead of over exposing the egret.

BTW, if the egret is small in the frame, you may not be able to detect the white clipping on the histogram so you'll need to check the LCD image as well to see if any part of the egret is blinking which indicated overexposure.