Since this is final exam week, I haven’t had much free time in daylight to take advantage of the zoom tele-converter that I bought, to test it in the field. however, on my way in to work this morning I stopped by the Tama River and found a few subjects to try it out on.

The usual flock of Cormorants was in attendance, and the 16x shot of them turned out pretty well:

Click on the image to see a larger, less-cropped image.

But the better find was a group of four Great Egrets. Now, I think I saw a Great Egret before (an old photo taken at Shinjuku Gyoen, years back), but I was less sure of that than this time. The were pretty big birds, and from their size and the length of their necks, I’d say that they pretty much have to be Greats, not Intermediates.

That image is full-size–that is to say, cropped but not scaled down. The bird was fairly well into the river, so I’d say the zoom is working pretty well. Of course, that’s a pretty big bird. And there were four of them:

And this photo, which can be seen in larger size if you click on it:

I tried to get closer for some slightly better shots, but these birds, even twenty or more meters into the river, don’t like observers on the banks to get too close, and they flew off.