My lens buying addiction took an interesting turn while I was in Japan this past week. I was about to meet up with my cousin, who works for Canon's printer division at Shibuya, one of Tokyo's busiest of places on one Saturday. I got there about an hour or so early, and as I walked out of the train station I saw a huge banner hanging from the top of the department store (Tokyu department store), and it said, "Used Camera Fair."

I knew I was in trouble.

It was as if I was hypnotized. I made my way through the department store, seemingly knowing exactly where to go even though I had no idea. I only had an hour or so, but for whatever reasons I am not entirely clear, I knew that I would get there in time and have plenty of time to browse around.

And I did. It was being at the top floor, where special events like these are typically held. There were 10 venders or so, each bringing their loads of used inventory, neatly being displayed under the show cases. It was typical Japanese. Nearly all of the merchandises were in top conditions.

Just about every brand was represented. Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Olympus, Hasselblad, Mamiya, Leica, and you name it, they had it.

My interests were, naturally, lenses.

I knew I only had few minutes, and I knew that I was not supposed to, you know, not buy anything when my wife was not around to be consulted with, if you know what I mean.

About 5 minutes into it, this old Pentax-Takumar 300/f telephoto lens caught my eye. The reason it did was that it was such in pristine condition; in fact, it looked brand new although this lens was manufactured sometimes in the mid 1960's. The mount was not bayonet; and it was what is called M42 screw mount. In the old days, they used to screw the lens right onto the body. That is a weird thought, as I have never seen a camera with a screw mount.

One of, if not the only cool thing about Pentax DSLR is that you can use just about any lenses ever produced by Pentax with the newest of the camera body, like K-7. All I needed was an adapter that cost less that 30bucks.

Before I knew it I had my wallet out. It was about $150 us. I wasn't sure if it was a good deal at the time (apparently it was). But I bought it anyway, because it looked so clean, so neat, and it didn't have AF.

Tomorrow, I will be posting pictures taken by this beast. One will be surprised how good pictures it takes, considering that the thing is close to 50 years old.

This is really a gem.

Takumar is the last name of the half brother of the initial founder of Pentax, or something like that. When you go to Pentax Forum, you will find a group of die-hard Takumar fans, who almost exclusively shoot with these screw mount lenses, because according to them, the optical formula and materials have no equals, even compared to the most expensive lenses available on the market today.

Pentax K-7

DA 35/2.8 macro ltd

1/250 @ f/9

0 ev

ISO 200