Offbeat: Ansel Adams garage sale photos worth USD200m

An American collector has become an overnight multimillionaire after a set of 65 glass negatives he picked up at a garage sale turned out to be genuine Ansel Adams works, he and his lawyer said Tuesday.
Rick Norsigian, a school district painter and collector, bought the photographic plates in Fresno, California for 45 dollars a decade ago. Now they have been authenticated and are valued at 200 million dollars, he told a press conference.
Adams was one of the foremost nature photographers of his era, known for his images of the American west, especially Yosemite National Park.
“The experts have emphatically determined that the negatives were in fact created by the iconic photographer Ansel Adams,” said Norsigian, who also released the findings on his website.
Norsigian’s lawyer Arnold Peter said the authentication represented a number of challenges, involving experts not only in photography but handwriting for notations and meteorology for evidence of weather at the time Adams took his famed landscape pictures.
Adams, who died in 1984, was believed to have lost many of his negatives in 1937 in a darkroom fire. The blaze destroyed as many as 5,000 negatives, or around one-third of his portfolio. Many of the negatives had never been developed into photographs.