sigma

This week in the news: CES brought with it a slew of new product announcements. Canon introduced the Powershot N; the Nikon D 5200 arrives in the United States; Fujifilm announces the X100S & X20; Pentax launches the stylish MX-1, and much more!

This is your B&H Photo Pulse News Roundup for January11^th, 2013. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest news as it breaks.

This week in the news: Canon announced a new camera for those looking up at the sky, while Phase One announced a new camera for those looking down at the ground; Instagram came to Android; Sigma added a new lens to their lineup, and more...

This is your B&H Photo Pulse News Roundup for April 5th, 2012.

B&H and Sigma Photo are giving away a most coveted lens—the Sigma 50mm F/1.4 EX DG HSM. If you've ever wanted a sharp, contrasty, fast-apertured lens with professional-grade construction, here's your chance to get your hands on one with the lens mount of your choice!

Click Read and Discuss to see how you can enter and snag this very-well-reviewed lens.

Regardless of the focal length of your favorite lens, I'd venture to say you've been in situations where you've tried to focus in tight on your subject and inevitably hit the wall—the minimum focus point of your lens. Sure you can crop, but in a perfect world it would be swell if each of our lenses would focus as close to our subjects as our mind's eye focuses. Alas, the world isn't perfect... but we do have macro lenses.

The first words usually uttered by somebody peering through an ultra wide-angle lens for the first time is usually something along the lines of “Whoa!”—and the wider the lens, the louder the “Whoa!” While peering through an extreme telephoto lens can also coax a “Whoa!” from the viewer, it’s because of its ability to bring distant subjects seemingly within arm’s length. Ultra-wides are different in their ability to interpret objects that actually are within arm’s-length distance in a different light. And that’s what makes them special.

For many shooters, telephoto lenses are a means of bringing distant scenes closer, and for the most part, this is an accurate description of what telephoto lenses do. But there's more to telephoto lenses than narrow fields of view. Perspective, compression of spatial relationships between subjects within the frame and the dynamics of selective focus are equally part of the game.

For many DSLR owners, there comes a time when one wants to go beyond the kit lens that came with the camera. The reasons vary. For some it's a matter of sharpness. For others it's a matter of speed and/or focal-length restrictions. And for some it's simply the fact they don't like the ''icky" feel of a plastic lens barrel, regardless of how sharp the lens may or may not be.