Perhaps some of you might remember the little Foto-Mat film drop off booths that used to adorn the local shopping center parking lots.

About a year ago I happened to find an old Foto-Mat 500mm f-8 to f-45, manual focus, preset aperture lens at Goodwill Industries for the outrageous sum of $15 and they were throwing in a Sears 2x teleconveter with the Pentax PK mount.

The lens was still new in the box with the original manufacturers cellophane wrapping and an old faded price tag that said $79. The lens has a proprietary T type mount and it came with three mount adapters for Nikon, Canon & Pentax.

Now I know that most ppl would have just dismissed it as junk, but it did have a PK mount so it would work on all my Pentax film & DSLR cameras and afford me full aperture control on all my Pentax Film & DSLR's.

Well today was one of those occassion when Jan & I were just going down to the pond to relax a while, and since it was threatening to rain I decided to play with my light weight, cheap lens, and furthermore, I thought this would be a good opportunity to show Jan how we took photos back in the days before automated cameras.

I hung the lens on a tripod, then attached a Pentax K10d DSLR body with a remote shutter release cable and turned the camera mode selector to "Manual".

I then handed Jan a Gossen "Luna Pro" handheld light meter and showed her how to measure ambient light, then set up the camera.

As we were watching the pond a large "Green Heron flew down and landed on a piece of drift wood on the opposite end of the pond about 800ft away. I fired off a few shots, then switched to an 18-55mm zoom and set it at 20mm to give an overall view of the pond from our vantage point. Note in the view of the pond I put an arrow to show where the bird was standing.

Now I will be the first to admit that this is lens is a far cry from what we would call world class optics, but I can see a potential for having some fun with it, and I surely don't feel I got took too bad at $15.