Good photography tells a story, you want the viewer of your photograph to immediately understand what that story is. There are visual tricks to pull that off. One of the best is to use contrast to draw the viewers eye to the subject. The image shown above is an example. The white egret is immediately the subject against the dark background.

To accomplish this, first you need to isolate the subject against a dark background. Often, as in this example, the way to do this is photography the subject in bright sunlight against a background in shadow.

One tricky thing about this is that it nearly always fools your camera's meter. If you shoot in an automatic mode, the dark background will be rendered lighter as well as the light subject, often burning out the details. Judicous use of negative exposure compensation or as I do, manually metering using a spot meter on the bright subject and adding about 2 stops of light, is required to get things right.

Below is an example of a dark subject against a light background. The same visual cues are involved. Again, exposure can become a challenge. I metered on the cat and subtracted 2 stops.

Keeping this in mind as you work your subject will improve your ability to make your subject stand out in a scene.