lovely, but deffinitely the oddest looking chicken I've ever seen.

The Vivitar Series 1 105 is also known as the Kiron 105 Macro, and is widely regarded to be among the finest ~100mm macros ever made.

The Tamron is a fine lens, but is outclassed by the Vivitar/Kiron. By reputation even the Pentax D/FA struggles to match it.

Amazing what was achieved with so little isn't it?

It has come to my attention recently that we are living in the future!

1. The 50mm F1.4 is a little soft wide open, but keep in mind focus is also very critical at such wide apertures. My 50mm 1.4 is soft wide open (though still nice for portraits), acceptably sharp by F2.4 and by F4 you could cut yourself on it. If you would like me to take some test shots to help you determine if yours is performing normally, I would be happy to do so (though it might take a day or two).

2. The 55-300 is the obvious choice, it's a better lens in all optical respects than the 50-200. It is larger though which might limit its usefulness for candids. The lovely thing about the 50-200 is no one realises how long it is until they see the photos, as it basically looks like a standard short zoom.

Alarmingly for those brave men who went to the moon, that is almost certainly true.

True, but I've always felt that 2nd is under-rated as a gear

retail therapy works just as well for us guys, my K10D was an RT purchase.

if I had taken those as a guest, I would be disgusted at my own inability to correctly expose them. 1, 2 and 3 would have gone straight in the bin unless the leaving the house shot had specific sentimental value, 4 and 5 I would have sworn at the exposure and tried to save in post processing but ultimately probably binned those as well.

obviously you wont want all that tat, just chuck it on a plane to oxfordshire and I'll get rid of it for you......

looks bargainacious!

very good for a phone camera, but I note that all the pictures are taken in bright sunlight.

One of these days I'm going to get around to calculating the maximum possible resolution of a lens that small, I'm interested to see if it is physically possible to approach the capabilities of a current DSLR using a phone camera. My suspicion is that it is not.