After owning my Nikon D70 for about six months, I decided to increase my total number of lenses from one to two. I bought a zoom lens because I wanted to take more photos of people, and could do so from a more comfortable distance. Additionally, after going on safari with a film camera and manual zoom lens, I found it extremely difficult to manually track, zoom and focus on moving animals. I figured I could optionally out-source the focus part to the zoom.
On advice from two professional photographers, I eschewed the Nikon lenses for third-party knock-offs at half the price. I’m not a good enough photographer to know the difference. I bought a Tamron AF70-300MM F/4-5.6 from the excellent folks at Dunne & Rundle on Granville St.
On Saturday night, I took it with me to the Illuminares Lantern Festival at Trout Lake. It’s a kind of anarchic gathering and pagan celebration of something, something…the tip of the Burning Man iceberg, except with lanterns.
I took a ton of photos. Ironically, most of them are before it got dark. Combine my lack of skill, the big lens and darkness and all you get are a lot of bright, blurry lines. These are three of my favourites:
The lens also has a macro setting–here are a few mundane experiments.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
A photographer friend of mine has assured me that Tamron lenses are actually pretty darn good. In fact, I believe that 300mm lense won a few awards. I bought a Tamron lense not too long ago, and I’m quite satsified with the results. That is, my pictures still suck, but they don’t suck any worse than they did before. 😉
is it noisy? how responsive is the auto-focus?
It sounds like it was an interesting event. Very nice photos.
In the price range you’re looking at, Tamron lenses are every bit as good as ‘name’ lenses, and in fact most reasonable people consider Tamron a ‘name’ brand. When you buy a Tamron lens, you’re getting a known quantity, a quality lens at a reasonable price.
There are some performance differences between a lens like you have and the higher priced Nikon lenses, but with one important exception (maximum aperture) it isn’t anything you’d even be able to detect.
On looking at the photos, two stand out: “Julie With Mask” & “Belle of the Ball”. Good photos.