These lenses can be bought on ebay for next to nothing. This one taken with the Pentax 28 f2.8 is one of my favourites from last year. Converted with Nik SFX2 (which is fabulous by the way) it shows what this lens is capable of. I think one of my purchases for 2012 with be Nik Colour Efex. But the things are so damned expensive! I also wanted to upgrade to Photoshop CS5, but I bought a new computer instead for less, and my CS3 now runs very fast. No need for that upgrade. I think the pricing of these software packages if way too high. I think if they brought the price down, many more people would buy it and their base customers would increase, making them more money in the end. But maybe I'm missing something here.

Another lens that cost me nearly nothing and it was the first manual focus lens I bought. You could say it was this lens (together with the Yashica 55 f2) that converted me to manual focus lenses. At f1.8 it has this dreamy look. Not unpleasant but I like mine a bit sharper with clearly defined edges. The next post will show an image with this lens wide open. It will clearly show what I mean.

There are some great bargains out there to be had. This lens which is now discontinued I believe, acts like a 170mm lens on a full format camera. I really need the IBIS with these longer lenses nowadays, I'm not as young as I used to be and hand holding these lenses is a real challenge. I cought this one from my balcony one evening not really thinking it would turn out into anything special. I like it.

This is one of the sharpest lenses I own. Since aquiring the Olympus series of m4/3 cameras, I've been moving slowly to legacy manual focus lenses. Two reasons really, the first being that it is fun using these lenses (especially with the Olympus cameras). Secondly, they are cheap (but prices are rising fast). It slows you down so that you have to focus where you want the focus to be and that helps composition immensly. You look around the edges more, you move closer to your subject or move away if you're too close. If you haven't tried this yet, please do. It brings back some life into your photography.

I think this turned out really well for a P&S. It was really a snapshot taken on the spur of the moment. Again, it's one camera that really has me stumped sometimes. Personally I think there's a minor bug in the firmware somewhere because some images are so blown out or the blacks are so blocked and for no reason at all. Doesn't happen every time but when it does this you can really delete the image. No recovery possible.

Sorry, another repost from some time ago. I think was taken using manual focus. I like this lens a lot. Feels much better than the Panasonic 100-300 when handling.

I'm reposting this image just t show the difference with yesterdays image. One taken with an Olympus system and the other with a Panasonic system. Could you really tell which image was taken with which system? I'm not really sure I could if I saw the images for the first time.

Every time I take this combination out, it's great fun. Small, unobtrusive and delivers great images. Bokeh isn't all that bad either when you look at the above image.