And don't forget the need for good composition as well as 'seeing'. These are very nicely composed.

Beautiful and more beautiful and then, WOW!

Another 'sharpening' trick with Topaz is to process the full size job then resize it to a much smaller format. Then sharpen it again. This is indeed a 'trick' and once you've done it you can't process it any further!
On the other hand, don't give up on the mirror lens. This was shot with the Pentax 400 - 600 zoom mirror at 420mm, hand held
.

I think you will find a problem with 50mm. You simply can't mount it sufficiently close to the sensor. You MIGHT get it to focus as a dedicated macro lens?

How many variants are there of this? Mine is f2,8. Tiny difference but different it is.

Like I said, I'd like to have a go with it! The vine leaves stand out for me but the rest are right behind.
Off topic note - your acer leaves are going red already, as are mine. It's really early this year.

Ooh. I'd like to have a go with that!

Err. No. It is screwed on tight and It takes a little bit of lathe work - fortunately, not on the lens components, although that wouldn't be the first time since all of these beasties are unique and you only have so much space to play with - about 48mm. Neither will any donor lens of less than 50mm focal length work since you cannot get it sufficiently close to the sensor plane of a DSLR to achieve focus.

Here is the lens porn of the Xenar 75mm (I erroneously mentioned 35mm above) mounted, via an M42 thread and a new Chinese helicoid onto my K5. It will cover full frame too, as shown above but the K5 was convenient.



The front cell will handle focusing by itself but the addition of the helicoid in place of the original plain 20mm extension tube provides a considerable range of options. It's also easier to operate! Consider the following to demonstrate that range of options ....

From absolute close up, through 'normal', to extreme 100% crop, we have a tiny tormentil flower poking up through the dry hay.



A general, 'after the harvest' landscape



and a full 100% crop from it to demonstrate the detail displayed. (a bit underexposed - sorry!)



The remainder are simply things I met on my walk. The sunflower, as well as the tormentil, shows how well it copes with that difficult colour, yellow, in full sunlight.



The chains and the sloe berries are, respectively, detailed and close up.






and the final two show textures and colour handling as well as being very close up.

The first is a wasp gall on a dog rose briar. If you cut it open it will have maybe 15 little chambers, each of which contains a wasp lava. The eggs are laid in a leaf axil, which then develops into these ball shaped, filamentous growths instead of a leaf.





This one appeared in the general gallery a day or so back as it was the first of the set that I processed.

I hope you will agree with me that the £20 Chinese helicoid was a good purchase!

Ah. Sorry about that - I said I'd report back. I've just put it onto a K5 and I will have a play with it tomorrow!