I was handed down an olympus e300 with 2 lenses. The lens are decent but I dont think they are particularly good for indoor shots because their largest apeture is too small, f/3.5 if I remember correctly.

so I was looking for a new lens to get and I came across this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/tech-data/B0000TU7I6/ref=de_a_smtd/103-7583988-0119865?%5Fencoding=UTF8

it looks good, with f/2.0, but what exactly is a "telephoto macro lens"? is it a specialized lens that is only useful for certain types of shots? or can I do general shots like landscapes, portraits, sports, etc ?

thanks for any help

With the Olympus 2x sensor, it will have the equivalent field of view of a 100mm lens on a 35mm camera. That amounts to a moderate telephoto - 85mm was one of my favorite focal lengths on 35mm and it's good for a lot of things but probably not especially with nature at least from my experience. It's also a little long for a lot of indoor photography - at least in my case, ymmv...

It's also sort-of a macro lens because it can focus very close - about 9" in this case. All the macro lenses I've seen can focus to infinity, and it looks like this lens is no exception (look at the picture on Amazon very close and you'll see the infinity marker on the lens). No lens is perfect for everything, but I can see this being a lens I'd get if I shot Olympus.

Macro means, "Minimum Focal Range: 9.4 inches". And telephoto just means larger than life. It's considered a telephoto due to the small sensor crop factor. I just read that it's a 50mm equivilant to 100mm. That's a bit too much telephoto for landscapes, I'd reckon, but for portraits, and sports, etc, it should be great.

Don't know if you saw this but I read that it is not a zoom lens... I also take pictures of sports and I'm thinking I probably would have to have a zoom lens for that....