Cider Encore

I've taken something close to this shot before, but this was a chance to test a new lens... from J.C. Penney's, if you can believe it. :)

Back in the 60's/70's, the three major US department store chains - Sears, Wards, and Penney's - all sold 35mm SLRs under their own labels. These were usually relabeled cameras and lenses from one of the major Japanese/Korean contract manufacturers; Cosina, Kiron, Komine, Samyang, etc. Some of them were mediocre; some of them very good indeed... but you never knew what you were going to get.

I wasn't expecting much from this lens, and bought it mostly as a curiosity. Most department store cameras/lenses I've encountered used one of the 'universal' shared mounts like M42 (used by many manufacturers since the late 40s) or K-mount (created by Pentax and used by some other companies including Ricoh, Chinon and Samsung). This photographer, though, had multiple cameras from Olympus, Minolta, Nikon, Pentax, Canon, and others... and had Sears and Penney's lenses for many of these mount systems. So I picked up a couple; and got pleasantly surprised by this one!