Thanks for your time everyone. You've all picked upon the things that bothered me, mostly the "odd" bokeh effects. Which as picked up by CT, also can give some strange looking flare effects too.
Oh.... and yes that is muck on my sensor showing in the top left corner. There's actually much more of it hiding in there too. :embarrassed:
Robert, thanks for putting up those shots of yours. Certainly tells me there is nothing wrong with my copy but that is an unusual effect isn't it' Like you I think I'll have to forgive it this little oddity for that fact that it's soooo good at so many other things. After all, now I know what it does with high contrast backgrounds with very close subjects, it's not too much hassle just to use another lens for those shots.
Some of you also mentioned that the subject in both the shots I put up are soft. That's not the lens, both were taken in quite a stong wind and while the shutter speed was probably high enough to freeze the movement, they were blowing around enough to move a fair bit from where the focus was set.
I've done some seperate test for sharpness on the tripod and the results of these have also posed some questions. I think that's more to do with my constant worry that all my lenses for the canon are not good enough though.
I do tend to judge them by the standard set my Mamiya kit and that's not really a fair test at all.
All in all, I think that once I settle into just using this 24-105 and not questioning everything it produces, we'll get on just fine.
Thanks again for all your help folks.
