By profession, Andrea Fernandez is a dentist. Her avocation is photography, which she took up at age 15. While traveling through Italy a few years ago, Fernandez, who is Colombian, was struck by the beauty of baroque-style fresco ceilings. "I love the use of space, tension, and connection that the figures depict as they are 'ascending to heaven,'" she says. Inspired by the frescos, she later began a series of underwater images in which people are seen flying overhead. The series, which she calls "The Ascendents," was named a winner of the Latin American Fotografia 7 competition.

Robin Rice has taken up spinning. Not the kind you do on bikes, but the kind deejays do. She's got turntable set up at her loft in Beacon, New York, in a converted 19th-century textile mill along Fishkill Creek. A photo of her at her turntable was included recently in Chronogram, a lifestyle magazine focusing on the Hudson Valley, which coincided with an exhibition of Rice's own photography at her eponymous New York gallery -- the first time her gallery had shown the work, which she's been doing since the disco days of the 1970s. This month the images will be on view in her loft as part of Beacon Open Studios, an annual event in which artists open their workspaces to the public.

"Eventually you knew it had to happen. Sooner or later cameras would get so good at what they did that basically your job as a photographer would be to look for interesting things to shoot and then try not to get in the camera's way as it did it's thing capturing them. I mean, imagine if a camera had pretty much flawless exposure capability, flawless focusing and could fire and focus so fast it never missed a frame?" So writes Jeff Wignall in todays Street Test of the Sony a9 full-frame mirrorless camera. Sony Artisans of Imagery Katrin Eisman, Andy Katz, and Pat Murphy-Racey join in with their takes on the 24.2-megapixel camera that has caused an uproar in the photo industry.