Black and white vs. exposure

I photographed these black-necked swans in southern Chile on my last Patagonia photo tour, and when you include both black and white in the same frame -- especially in direct sunlight -- ir's a balancing act between retaining detail in the highlights and preventing the shadows from going solid black.  This is where the RAW files have to be processed by moving the shadows slider all the way to the right and the highlights slider all the way to the left in ACR or Lightroom.  If you have to choose texture and detail in only one area -- the whites or the blacks -- in almost all cases you have to go with the whites. Blown highlights ruin a picture, but solid black areas of a subject are usually, but not always, acceptable.  In this picture, I would have liked more detail to show in the necks of the birds, but still I was happy with this result.  My settings for this were 1/800, f/10, 200 ISO, and I used a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto with the 1.4x teleconverter.