News

Here are some tips I discovered when researching this month’s column. One was from my wife who uses this technique all the time—smile! And you know what, people smile back, making you appear friendly and non-threatening. The other was from Michael Archambault, who suggests you “acknowledge that street photography is not perfect.” Or as my grandfather once told me, “If you spend your whole life looking for happiness, it’ll make you miserable.”

What’s normal? Not asking about your weird uncle Walter who puts mayonnaise on his French fries—and his spaghetti. When photography went digital, understanding focal lengths became much more difficult. Let’s unravel a few of the mysteries so that we can make better educated decisions about lenses.

Along with this morning’s lens announcement, Sigma just introduced the new compact Sigma sd Quattro and Sigma sd Quattro H mirrorless camera systems with Foveon Quattro sensors. The Sigma sd Quattro features an APS-C sized sensor and the Sigma sd Quattro H has a slightly larger APS-H sized sensor.

Documentary photography, street photography, photojournalism, news photography, the photo essay—at their best, each records moments in time where man, nature, or machine impacts the surrounding universe. Centered in Rochester, New York, George Eastman, the man, and Eastman Kodak, the company, changed the universe around them as they rose to prominence. And when Eastman Kodak fell, a tidal wave broke on the shoulders of a city and its people.

Nikon just announced a brand new palm-sized, premium camera line with some classic Nikkor lens features. Called the DL series, the cameras include the DL24-85, DL18-50 and DL24-500 models, which combine Nikkor optics with large 20.8-megapixel (CX-format) 1-inch BSI CMOS sensors.

Tamron announced the new SP 85mm F/1.8 Di VC USD (Model F016) lens this morning, which the company is calling “the world’s first fast aperture telephoto lens with VC (Vibration Compensation).” 

It is true that documentary photography dates back to the Civil War but most photo history textbooks credit the era of the 1930s to the 1950s when photographers such as Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Alfred Eisenstaedt raised the public awareness of photojournalism and became famous for their magazine and newspaper work.