Originally posted by gifthorse My first choice would be the Komine built Vivitar 28mm f2 'close focus'
Beautiful pictures!
A great example of the results we can achieve using almost unknown lenses.
Apart from the obvious competence of the photographer, I noticed one thing.
IIRC, recently I read a comment about this very same lens, that reported good performance, but also a strong coma.
The night sky pics are not at very high resolution, so it's quite difficult to judge, though what I see are star trails, not comet-shaped points at the periphery of the image.
All this reminds me that vintage lenses can be judged by the performance of a good example (there no magic stroke of luck at the assembly line that turns a bad optic into something special), but not evaluated on the basis of a single bad example.
I'm happy to share my appreciation for a lens that performs much better than my original expectations. I tend to reserve my judgement when it's the other way round.
An old lens can underperform for non-obvious reasons... I mean, if nothing from the outside shows traces of damage.
It's not so common, but it happened to me a few times