Christian Rodriquez was born in New York. His mother and father came from the Dominican Republic, and Rodriguez spent most summers there with his grandparents. After eight years away from the DR, he decided to return there to work on a photo project about, he says, "family, immigration, and the Diaspora." That's when he met Leo, a young boy who had received a visa and would soon be immigrating to New York -- though not with his mother, whose visa wasn't yet approved. Rodriguez decided to follow Leo's journey. "I thought this could be an opportunity to document a universal process, one that is painful, scary, and extremely courageous," he says. His work is a winner of the Latin American Fotografia 7 competition.

Born and raised in a little village in the Italian Alps, Mauro De Bettio is now based in Barcelona, Spain. But his passion for telling stories about people and cultures as a documentary photographer has taken him around the world. Two of his images were chosen as finalists in the American Photography Open 2018 competition -- a photograph made at the Ursul "bear dance" festival in Romania, a ritual that symbolizes the death and rebirth of time; and a photograph of ship breakers in Bangladesh. "I think that the photograph represents my way of speaking, and what I try to do through my language is to capture the sense of what I breathe and touch with my hands" says De Bettio.

"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.