That's incredibly cute! Are you going to find some flies for him to eat?

Oh well, I was close on the year - the paint must have faded after 40+ years in the sun...

OK, I'll bite; doesn't look dark enough to be a Massey Ferguson, too orangey for International Harvester, so I'm going to guess at a Zetor of some description? As for year, the bakelite gear knob and choke say late 50's/early 60's to me. Am I close?

Wow! Third place! I'm really chuffed with that so thanks Duncan.

Excellent judging and congratulations to all the entrants, especially Lilly for another well-deserved win - I look forward to this week's title.

K10D / DA12-24 / f4 / 1-45sec / ISO100

Congratulations - that's an excellent starting point. The kit lens and the Tamron nicely cover all the bases between wide and long telephoto, and the FA50 serves not only as a low-light lens but should also give you an appreciable boost in quality over the other two.

I recently introduced a friend to SLR photography and she ended up buying exactly the same set-up (2x 2GB cards and no bag yet though) from SRS and she's delighted with the results so far - I'm sure you will be too.

Birds in flight are difficult to focus on even when the camera's working perfectly, so it's not really a good subject to draw conclusions about the focussing performance on. Having said that, numbers 3 and 4 look like they're in focus to me and numbers 1 and 2 look slightly off. Hope that helps!

It is indeed a hover fly and very nicely captured too!

In short; yes.

Just be aware that you'll have no lens automation (that's true of all M42 lenses with adaptors) and that the rig will need a careful setup for each shot (extremely narrow depths of field require precision focussing) - neither of which is a problem for still-life type shots but you're unlikely to catch many fast moving insects, etc. The results should be reasonably good quality though so go for it.

Bet you're glad you didn't try taking it apart now then...