The morning walk was down to Ponce again.  The Great Blue Herons appear to have mated and have eggs in the nest.  I can’t see them but the female has gone broody and is down on the nest most of the time.  Things won’t change much for a while now on that front but that doesn’t mean activity is down.  This morning, I found a Black Racer in the grasses along the seawall and a Little Blue Heron feeling safe enough to pose for a portrait.

It’s hard to get a decent shot in this position because the snake tends to bury itself in the grass.  In this case, I found it sunning itself before going hunting.  It was a good two feet long and let me take a couple of shots.  I found this Little Blue Heron posing on one of the pilings of the boat launch.

Quite the handsome fellow.  As I walked around I struck up a conversation with a fellow waiting for a photo class to start.  I noticed that he had the Nikkor 55-300mm on a Nikon D5200 for the class.  As we chatted, I asked him if I could borrow his lens for a couple of shots to compare it with my 55-200mm on the Nikon V1 body.  Since the broody heron was on the nest, I moved over to a parking signpost to establish a common position and took a couple of shots with each lens.  Here are the results.  They are straight from the camera jpegs with a full height crop at 1024×786 ratio and then resized to 1024×768 for web display.  If you click on them, you will see a larger view.  For these first two, the left image is the 55-200 and the right is the 55-300.  I did find it harder to hold the 55-300mm steady even with the VR on.  Considering it was the equivalent of an 810mm lens on an FX camera that’s not too surprising.

By way of comparison, I cropped the 55-200 image on the left to approximately the same size as the 55-300mm.  Here is the result.

Please note, these are not formal optical tests of the lenses.  The show results that I find in the field using normal operating methods.  In this case, I find the 55-200 better than the 55-300 but, had I had the longer lens on a monopod or tripod, the results could be different.  Both seem to work well with the V1.