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Tamron will start shipping its image-stabilized 28-300mm lens on Monday–but only in Japan and for Canon SLRs, the company said.
The lens, formally called the AF 28-300mm F/3.5-6.3 Di VC, is one of a host of new
image-stabilized superzoom lenses on the market. Nikon has said its 18-200mm model is its all-time bestseller. Sigma recently added its own 18-200mm competitor. And Panasonic, whose lenses are compatible with Olympus SLRs and vice versa, also offers a 14-150mm model, which is the same range when translated into 35mm camera terms.
Tamron had planned to release the lens in August, but said that month it had to delay availability. “We are obliged to postpone the release of the product because we have found a technical problem in a part of the VC (Vibration Compensation) mechanism,” the company said.
A Nikon version of the lens will be available in early spring, Tamron said. The Canon version has a few compatibility limitations with older Canon SLR models.
Superzoom lenses offer a much broader range–from wide angle to telephoto–than other types of lenses. But they don’t offer a free lunch. Typically, they suffer when it comes to sharpness, distortion and vignetting compared with higher-end zoom lenses with narrower ranges or with “prime” lenses with a fixed focal length.
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September 17th, 2007 · 1 Comment
Six decades after the death of an unheralded New York City municipal photographer, a researcher stumbles upon his forgotten negatives
By Carolyn Kleiner Butler
In 1999, Michael Lorenzini, the senior photographer for the New York City Municipal Archives, was spooling through microfilm of the city’s vast Department of Bridges photography collection when he realized that many of the images shared a distinct and sophisticated aesthetic. They also had numbers scratched into the negatives. “It just kind of hit me: this is one guy; this is a great photographer,” Lorenzini says. But who was he?It took many months and uncounted hours of trolling through archives storerooms, the Social Security index, Census reports and city records on births, deaths and employment to find the answer: the photographer was Eugene de Salignac, a municipal worker who took 20,000 photographs of modern Manhattan in the making.
”It felt like a real discovery,” Lorenzini says.Still, what is known about de Salignac remains limited, and there are no known photographs of him as an adult.
Born in Boston in 1861 and descended from French nobility, he married, fathered two children and, after separating from his wife in 1903, started working for the City of
“It Felt Like A Real Discovery”
New York at age 42. He was the official photographer for the Department of Bridges from 1906 to 1934. At that point, his work—including original plate-glass negatives, corresponding logbooks in his elegant script and more than 100 volumes of vintage prints—began collecting dust in various basement storerooms. He died in 1943, at 82, unheralded.But de Salignac is now having his day: the Museum of the City of
New York is exhibiting his work through October 28, and Aperture has published a related book, New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac, with essays by Lorenzini and photography scholar Kevin Moore.De Salignac’s time as a city worker coincided with
New York’s transformation from a horse-and-buggy town into a modern-day metropolis, and his photographs of towering bridges, soaring buildings, trains, buses and boats chart the progress. “In this remarkable repository of his work, we really see the city becoming itself,” says Thomas Mellins, curator of special exhibitions at the Museum of the City of
New York. “During this period, New York became a paradigm for 20th-century urbanism, and that has to do with monumentality, transportation systems, working out glitches, skyscrapers, with technology—all of the things that emerge in these photos.”De Salignac’s photograph of the Staten Island ferry President Roosevelt coming into port, made in Lower Manhattan in June 1924 with a bulky wooden field camera, typifies his ability to stretch beyond straightforward documentation. “This is not your typical
municipal photograph,” says
Moore. “There’s a sense of anticipation—that perfect moment where the boat is about to dock, and a sense of energy, a flood about to be unleashed.” Adds Lorenzini: “It shows him thinking like an artist.”
De Salignac’s pictures have been reproduced in books, newspapers, posters and films, including Ken Burns’ Brooklyn Bridge; though largely uncredited, his work helped shape New York’s image. “He was a great chronicler of the city, in the tradition of Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Stieglitz and Berenice Abbott,” says Mellins. “The fact that he was a city employee may have made it less likely that people would think of his work in an artistic context, but these images indicate that he really takes his place in the pantheon of great photographers of New York. Lorenzini still isn’t satisfied. “I’d like to know what he did for the first 40 years of his life, to see a photograph of him as a grown man,” he says. “Where did he learn photography? Was he formally trained? Did he consider himself an artist?” Information about him, and prints by him, keep trickling in. Not long ago, a woman mailed to the Municipal Archives ten photographs of
New York that she’d bought at a Texas flea market; Lorenzini immediately recognized them as de Salignac’s. And a cache of 4,000 de Salignac prints was recently unearthed in Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhatten. “There is definitely more to the story,” Lorenzini says.Carolyn Kleiner Butler is a writer and editor in
Washington, D.C.
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Nikon launches the D3

“Nikon has eclipsed the competition with the D3, a cutting edge camera that will change how professional photographers take pictures,” said Robert Cristina, Brand Manager, Nikon Professional Products, Europe. “The incredible speed, resolution and flexibility of the D3 will enable photographers to capture images under conditions previously thought impossible.”
The D3, the result of years of development and feedback from professional photographers, combines many innovative Nikon technologies. These include an exclusive 12.1 effective megapixel FX format (36.0×23.9mm) image sensor with 12-channel read out, a blazing-fast 9 fps frame rate, expandable ISO settings from 200-6400, a completely new 51-Point autofocus system, a 3-inch VGA LCD screen with Live View and a cutting-edge image processing system.
Read more about this here- Nikon Imaging
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There’s really no debate whether or not a tripod is essential gear for steady shots, and advances in technology have given us incredibly light and more durable models to carry in the field.
Creative photography requires more than merely a steady shot, however, and you may often encounter photo opportunities for which a typical tripod isn’t the best solution. Whether aiming for new and exciting angles, looking for unusual portability or originating a new kind of tripod altogether, the models we’ll look at here feature creative answers to some unique situations.

Manfrotto’s 190XPROB sports a popular new innovation in tripods. By extending the center column camera support all the way to its uppermost vertical position, the column can then be swung, still attached, into a horizontal alignment for extremely low shooting, perfect for macro photography of flowers or insects. The 190XPROB works in a height range from 57.5 inches all the way down to 3.3 inches, with four leg-angle settings at 25, 46, 66 and 88 degrees. Leg warmers are included to ease handling in harsh weather. Estimated Street Price: $145.
Sunpak’s FlexPod Pro mini-tripod takes a flexible approach t
o camera
support. The FlexPod Pro wraps segmented legs around uneven surfaces like tree branches or fence posts to help you work at difficult angles. The non-slip leg joints grip on dry, smooth surfaces, and the legs can be extended for the FlexPod Pro to function as a traditional tripod. When the tripod is entangled, a quick-release plate detaches the camera swiftly. It supports a maximum load of 1.8 pounds. Estimated Street Price: $30.
When folded down into a flat square, the Cullmann Magic 2 tripod measures at an incredibly compact 13¾ inches by 1½ inches. This means easy portage, as the collapsed Magic 2 may even fit inside your camera bag. The screw-mounted legs can be joined with the center column to form a monopod for faster positioning and tracking, ideal for bird photography. A one-twist mechanism locks the leg in a single turn, and the Magic 2 includes a removable ballhead with quick-release capability. Estimated Street Price: $155.
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Now these days are gone
The Beatles photographs of Michael Peto
18 August 2007 to 2 March 2008
This exhibition features recently rediscovered photographs that have never been shown in Liverpool before, all of which were taken during the filming of The Beatles film ‘Help!’ in 1965.The pictures show The Beatles off guard and behind the scenes at a time when most professional photographers only had access to them at carefully managed photo calls. Nobody knows how Peto secured such unfettered access to the most famous group in the world, but these photos provide a fascinating insight into The Beatles at work and off duty.One of the great photo journalists of the 1960s, Michael Peto left 130,000 prints and negatives to theUniversity of
Dundee when he died in 1970. They were then archived and lay forgotten until their rediscovery in 2004.
Have a look at three of the photographs from the exhibition using the links below.
Michael Peto was born in
Bata, Hungary in 1908 and went to live in
Budapest in the 1930s. His work connected with the export of Hungarian craft products was instrumental in his reaching Britain.During the war he lived in
London where he worked for the Ministry of Labour and zealously backed the war effort. The personal secretary to Count M Karolyi, head of the New Democratic Hungary, much of his spare time was also devoted to planning the establishment of a socialist
Hungary after their homeland’s liberation. They did not foresee the postwar domination by the
USSR. Peto’s major interest lay in the study of the human form in its natural surroundings and there is no doubt that he was one of the supreme masters of this aspect of photographic art. Many famous figures from the worlds of politics, art and entertainment are featured in his pictures. The other major aspect of his work involved the arts in the 1950s and 1960s, especially the
London ballet scene around the time of the arrival of Rudolf Nureyev.He died on Christmas Day 1970, aged 62. The University of Dundee is a custodian and copyright owner of his entire photographic work.
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