My philosophy about light can be distilled down to one simple statement: there is no such thing as bad light.

For many photographers, saying something like this, that there is no such thing as bad light, is completely absurd. Everyone reading this article is, by default, is a nature photographer of some sort and is quite used to finding themselves in the wilds and confronted with lighting situations that are simply awful for whatever it is they are trying to photograph.

Consider this example. . .

Great egrets are exceedingly large white wading birds found on every continent except Antarctica. As any photographer who has spent time photographing these birds knows, the white of their feathers can be a real challenge to keep from overexposing – especially in sun. The coloration of the great egret’s feathers technically means they reflect all wavelengths of light, and therefore all colors of light, equally. Most animals are not pure white, so their fur or feathers absorb some amount of light and whatever color we see when we look at them is the wavelength of light that’s being bounced back at us.

A black bear is black because their fur absorbs most light. A northern cardinal is red because it absorbs all wavelengths of light except for those that produce the color red. But great egrets bounce every wavelength of light back at us in equal measure. Unlike most other animals, their feathers don’t absorb any real measurable amount of light. This means that great egrets are always going to be brighter than anything and everything around them since everything else is absorbing at least some amount of light.  

To photograph a great egret in the middle of the day means having to reduce our exposure down so low to compensate for all the light being reflected from the white feathers of the bird, that all the other “stuff” in the composition becomes murky and underexposed. Egrets are wading birds, typically found in the shallows of ponds, lakes, and marshes. Blue water on a sunny day quickly becomes an otherworldly dark murky blue when we expose for the feathers of an egret, for instance. The brown of branches, the green of vegetation, the feather colors of other non-white birds in the composition all become terribly underexposed in the process as well.

This scenario will send every self-respecting wildlife photographer packing, of course.

But does this mean it was bad light?

Or was it just a bad composition?  

If we take the same bright overhead midday full sun scenario but we find a different egret to photograph, perhaps one who also happens to be in full sun but is standing in front of a shaded b