With the intimate access of an insider but the cool gaze of an outsider, Fred W. McDarrah captured the cultural and political life of New York City during his 50 years as staff photographer and later photo director of the Village Voice. Besides that influential day job, he may be best known for his depictions of the Beat scene (and his infamous Rent-a-Beatnik service) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. So his show, “Fred W. McDarrah: The Artist’s World,” now on view at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York (April 24 – June 6, 2015) may come as a revelation.

McDarrah caught many of the most important painters and sculptors of the mid-20th century not just in considered environmental portraits, posing with their work, but at home in cold-water lofts, at post-opening Chinese dinners, and at play in Provincetown and eastern Long Island. Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, and countless other Abstract Expressionists appear here, as do Pop Art icons—Andy Warhol (never one to avoid a camera) chief among them. McDarrah, who died in 2007 at the age of 81, also captured portraits of important women artists such as Eva Hesse, Hannah Wilke, and Alice Neel, often long before they’d received much coverage in the press.

Although the Kasher show includes portraits that McDarrah took through the 1970s and exhibition prints he made as late as 1995, most of the exhibition is dedicated to the photographer’s 1961 book, The Artist’s World in Pictures. A vitrine displays the original volume, a small paperback long since out of print, along with the 1991 second edition (also out of print), which adds the subtitle “The photo classic that documents the New York School Action Painters.” Documents related to the publication fill the other shelves. More fascinating, to my eye anyway, are the postcards announcing events hosted by The Club, an artist’s organization that formed the epicenter of avant-garde art in New York and the Abstract Expressionism movement specifically; McDarrah served as doorman and keeper of the mailing list during the 1950s, and it was here that his amazing photographic record of the scene began.

Amazing it is. Kasher dedicated a long wall to displaying more than 110 original prints made for the book. They’re small, yet in their detail and tonal value they far outstrip their published version: The 1961 paperback doesn’t come close to doing them justice. But this show isn’t really about the photographic objects themselves—it’s about the milieu McDarrah so intimately photographed. There’s Jasper Johns playing bar-room shuffleboard with Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Rauschenberg, and the rest of the gang. Yes, Jim Dine actually painted himself silver for a performance piece as an “aluminum car.” A tiny photo of a batter in a softball game completing a powerful swing turns out to be “home run champ” Franz Kline.

Fred McDarrah may never have numbered himself among the great artists of his generation—he didn’t consider himself an artist at all—but he sure captured them in the wild.

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No doubt it took some doing, but New York’s Museum of Modern Art has acquired a complete set of August Sander’s monumental series, “People of the Twentieth Century.” Captured over the course of 60 years, 1892–1954, these 619 straightforward portraits by the German photographer combine carefully observed detail with a comprehensive typological approach that has influenced generations of photographers from Walker Evans to Diane Arbus to Rineke Dijkstra.

Sander photographed his subjects in a straightforward way, centering the figure in the frame and allowing the large format to soften the focus on the environment so that place becomes merely a hint at a larger context. He organized his portraits into seven broad categories, beginning with “The Farmer” and continuing through “The Skilled Tradesman,” “The Woman,” “Classes and Professions,” “The Artists,” “The City,” and “The Last People,” (which MoMA describes as depicting old age, sickness, and death). Within these groups he made some 45 separate portfolios. Literal and precise in its depiction of individuals, his work seems at the same time metaphoric and generalizing in its view of humanity.

But as encyclopedic as Sander’s creation can seem—his first show included 100 images—he never exhibited all of it together in his lifetime. The acquisition marks a milestone for the Museum of Modern Art. “This really is one of those ‘Wow!’ moments,” says Sarah Meister, curator, department of photography. “August Sander has been a strategic priority for MoMA for a long time.”

The museum already owned 80 of Sander’s works, but this full set of prints, made by the artist’s grandson Gerd Sander in the 1990s from his original glass-plate negatives, is unique in the museum world: The only time the set has ever been shown in its entirety was at the São Paolo Biennial in 2012. (MoMA acknowledged the “generosity of the Sander family” in its announcement.)

Meister likens the impact of this acquisition to that of MoMA’s unparalleled collection of Eugène Atget’s photographs in 1968, as well as to the museum’s comprehensive representation of work by Walker Evans, built over decades, beginning in 1933. When Evans reviewed recent publications of Sander’s and Atget’s work in 1931, Meister observed that Evans “identified in both [artists] the artistic potential of a precise and deliberate form of observation unique to photography. Now we have the opportunity to study these three towering achievements of the twentieth century together.”

The curator tells us that the museum has no immediate plans to exhibit Sander’s entire body of work together but is looking for opportunities to do so. That doesn’t mean, however, that these prints will be unavailable to scholars or to the public. “The Edward Steichen Photography Study Center is open to students and serious researchers, and all of the prints will be physically accessible there, by appointment,” Meister says. “We are also actively pursuing other opportunities to provide digital access to the collection.”

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Contemporary photography came relatively late to the National Gallery of Art, but its first major exhibition of recent work, “The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art,” acquired with the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, packs a wallop. On view at the Washington, D.C. museum through Sept. 13, 2015, the show is one of several exhibitions and events celebrating the 25th anniversary of the National Gallery’s photography department. It brings together a wealth of photographic works, many of them unique objects, from artists such as Chuck Close, Carrie Mae Weems, Adam Fuss, Sally Mann, Sophie Calle, and Chris McCaw, to name just a few.

American Photo’s editor-in-chief, Miriam Leuchter, spoke with Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art about the show and her institution’s approach to contemporary photography.

The Memory of Time will be on view until mid-September, but unlike some of your exhibitions, it won’t travel to other museums. So far I’ve seen it only through the catalogue (published by Thames & Hudson). It looks great, but I really want to get to Washington to see the show in person.

For many of these things, the size of the pieces matters so much and of course you can’t really get that through a printed reproduction. Many of them are just huge— the Vera Lutter and the Subotzky & Waterhouse Ponte City pieces are enormous— and that scale really affects how you respond to the work. It is a show that needs to be seen. We are pleased with how the catalogue turned out, but I always encourage looking at the original objects.

And your photography department is only 25 years old?

Photographs first came to the National Gallery in 1949 when Georgia O’Keefe donated the large and important key set of Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs—1600 Stieglitz photographs—but no more additions were made to the photography collection. I got there in 1978 and was charged with organizing and accessioning the Stieglitz collection, and once that was done we then did a series of photography exhibitions in the ’80s that directed more attention to photography. It was as a result of those shows that in 1990 the trustees decided that we could finally start collecting photography, 151 years after photography was announced.

How does contemporary photography fit in with your program?

We haven’t done a lot with contemporary photography in the past. In 1989 we did a big survey show, “On the Art of Fixing a Shadow,” which celebrated the 150th anniversary of the announcement of the process of photography, and that included work from 1839 to 1989. Since then we’ve shown contemporary photography, but more when it has been by established photographers—for example, Harry Callahan or Robert Frank. But we’ve never had an exhibition that has focused exclusively on contemporary photography until this one.

It feels like a real statement to me. The way you’ve chosen and organized these photos makes it seem as if you’re trying to say something about the role of photography now and the museum’s relationship to photography now. Is that fair?

Yes, I think it’s fair. We’re certainly not suggesting that this is a survey of everything that’s going on in contemporary photography. We’ve used the issues of time and memory and history as a way of focusing our acquisitions and the exhibition because we felt that a number of photographers were exploring these issues, but it is certainly not representing everything that is going on, and we don’t claim that it is in any way.

I think it would be hard to represent everything that is going on! But it is interesting to look at these trends and the historiography that’s happening in this show—it feels very cogent.

Well, I do feel that a lot of contemporary photographers are looking at the history of photography and questioning how older photographs have informed our contemporary understandings, for example, of race. You certainly see that in the Myra Greene photographs, where she used that older 19th century printing process, the ambrotype, to allude to photography’s historical role in teaching people how to see African-Americans not as individuals but as racial types.

But, I think the exhibition also shows contemporary photographers are interested in history and the passage of time more broadly, not only in how it relates to the history of photography. Carrie Mae Weems reflects on how African Americans have been presented not just in photographs but in paintings, as well—the title of one in the show is “After Manet,” so you know she is looking back to 19th century painting and thinking about how African-Americans were or were not included in that representation. And the exhibition also includes a lot of works where other photographers are looking at broader issues related to history, like Mark Ruwedel showing us the impact of 19th century railroads on the 20th and 21st century landscape, reminding us of the impact that our western expansion had on the land itself.

That speaks also to your notion of archives and how the idea of a collection comes into play for some of these photographers.

A number of photographers in the show recognized that that history is not a set and defined one, but that the archive—those collections of material—can be mined from a number of points of view and histories extracted from them. We have a very beautiful and evocative piece by the Vietnamese-American photographer Binh Danh who went back to the genocide museum that’s now in Phnom Penh on the site where the Khmer Rouge had killed many of their victims. The Khmer Rouge had this bizarre habit of photographing many of the people before they executed them. Binh Danh re-photographed many of these, not as the sort of quick, casual snapshots that the Khmer Rouge had done, but as unique daguerreotypes, giving a sense of pride and importance to these people who for the Khmer Rouge were just numbers to be executed.

There’s also a fascinating piece by Susan Meiselas in which were she documented the history of one of her own photographs as it has moved around the world. First came this picture that she took in Nicaragua in 1979 called “The Molotov Man,” which shows a Sandinista rebel about to hurl a Molotov cocktail. She then traced how that image had been appropriated by many different factions over the years, both pro-Sandinista forces and anti-Sandinista forces, even by the Catholic church, showing how this one image served all these different purposes. It was even screened onto the walls of buildings and then later painted out. It’s a fascinating record of the impact that a single photograph can have and how we can all interpret it in very different ways.

There are a lot of singular works in this group, both installations and unique pieces such as daguerreotypes. Why is that?

Photographers like Sally Mann and Myra Greene, who are exploring older photographic processes—daguerreotypes, ambrotypes—those are by their very nature unique objects. Then there are also people like Vera Lutter and Chris McCaw who are making in a sense direct positives. Vera Lutter photographs directly onto large sheets of paper for her camera obscura images and then not making prints from them. That was a very conscious decision on her part: She wanted to capture the direct image that is in the back of the camera obscura, so she doesn’t make prints. Chris McCaw also photographs directly onto photographic paper, not negative film because he’s using such high-powered lenses and found that the intensity of the sun was so strong that it would burn through the photographic paper and he wanted to have that actual mark of the sun on his images. So for them it is part and parcel of the process. For me, though, as a curator, it speaks to the fact that we were so lucky to be able to get these works now. If we didn’t get them now, chances are that we wouldn’t have had that second chance to get them later on because they are unique works and there aren’t multiple prints out there.

Some of these photographers don’t use a camera at all. Alison Rossiter and Christian Marclay, for instance.

Christian Marclay is using the photogram process, which is of course as old as Henry Fox Talbot. Alison Rossiter does something very different, sort of exploring what happens to photographic paper as it ages over time, an absolutely fascinating idea that has yielded some beautiful prints.

In some works, there is a hybridization of digital media and the physical print or object. But it’s fascinating to me how little a role digital photography seems to play in this collection considering the past 25 years.

I think it is there, but subtly. Some of the photographers do work digitally and then print their works using more traditional analog methods.

Idris Kahn’s “Houses of Parliament, London, 2012” is a great example of that.

Exactly. And even with images that are being captured digitally, if one is exhibiting in a museum a print, you usually have an inkjet print, not based on traditional analog photography but at least a print itself. I don’t see this [show] as a turning away from digital photography. I think in part it might be a function of the age of some of the artists in the exhibition. I think the oldest is Chuck Close and the youngest is probably Matthew Brandt. But probably the bulk of them are in their 50s and 60s. If we were doing an exhibition of, say, more photographers in their 30s and even 40s I think you would see a lot more digital photography—digitally captured inkjet prints, probably.

Looking at this exhibition not just as an anniversary but as a signpost for the future, what do you see both for the National Gallery and for photography?

As far as the Gallery is concerned, we will certainly continue to be actively involved in contemporary photography. As far as what the future of photography is, where does it go, I couldn’t possibly answer that question. Photography has been constantly changing throughout its entire history, adapting, and as each new technological change comes along, it seems to prompt new ways of thinking about and looking at the world. We’re obviously at the beginning of the digital age and we’re starting to see some of the changes that it’s provoking, and those will only continue in the future. The medium has changed so much over time, and digital is yet just one more change in its evolution. The fact that photography continues to be so strong and vital I think is just further indication of what a profoundly important medium it is for us.

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For big concerts and small DIY shows, here are the best cameras according to music photographers.

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“I’m a music fan,” says photographer Ian Witlen. As a kid wading into the crowd at punk and pop-punk shows with a camera in his hand, “Never in a million years did I think I’d have the chance to work in the business.” Yet that’s how this South Florida–based pro (thecameraclicks.com), whose background is in photojournalism, makes his living now—not just with editorial portraits but with arresting in-your-face images that capture the visceral energy of live acts in venues from tiny clubs to big outdoor festivals. And, like many other professional music photographers, he also still shoots for his own pleasure, as a fan.

That distinction is important, because when professional music photographers are on assignment (and sometimes when they’re off duty), they get access and opportunities at live shows that the audience does not. They can bring in more gear or different types of gear than ticket buyers are usually permitted, and they often command vantage points the crowd can’t reach. At the same time, when covering live performances on assignment, especially big acts, pros often find themselves subject to limitations—confined to a designated area for music photographers (“the pit”) and afforded only one to three songs to get the shots they need.

Whether you’re shooting for clients or for yourself, the choice of what camera, lenses and other gear to bring boils down to three factors: the size of the venue, how close you can get to the stage, and the size and style of cameras the artist or venue permits you to use.

Really Big Shows

Nowhere in concertdom is the divide between professional music photographers on assignments and fans in seats more apparent than at large arena shows. Most of the audience is far from the stage and the artists and their managers put different restrictions on photographers in terms of what and when they can shoot.

While pros with the right access might lug in a full-frame DSLR and a host of lenses, ordinary ticket buyers are limited by house rules—or even the whim of whoever’s checking bags at the gate. It’s crucial to learn the ground rules in advance. Never assume that a rig permitted at one show will be allowed at another, even at the same venue, regardless of size. “The venue goes along with the artist’s wishes,” says New York–based photographer Ryan Muir (ryanmuir.com), known for his evocative image of LCD Soundsystem’s final show at Madison Square Garden in 2011. He got this dramatic side angle from the photographers’ pit, a no-go zone for the audience, using a 35mm f/1.8G DX Nikkor on a Nikon D700 body (he recently switched to the D750).

Muir’s favorite shots give more of a sense of the relationship between performers and fans, but at a big show it can be tough to get them in the same frame. “I like making sense of chaos,” he says, “but the bigger the act, and the bigger the venue, the more separation there is between the artist and the crowd.” Getting them together demands an ultra-wide-angle lens. “If the scale of the audience is especially vast—think EDM (electronic dance music)—I may throw a fisheye on top of a monopod and shoot from above with a delayed timer. It depends on how I previsualize the show and what elements are important to capture any given night.”

When on assignment, Muir generally brings a bag full of Nikon equipment, including a second body as emergency backup. His favorite zooms are the 17–35mm f/2.8D and the 80–200mm f/2.8D. Besides simply providing telephoto reach in a big arena, he says, “It can be useful for flattening space across the front edge of a wide stage to compose artists together who may be standing several feet apart—I call this ‘raking’—or to punch into someone at the back, perhaps the drummer. If you’re patient, it’s also useful for catching clean close-up expressions from the side as artists turn away from the microphone in between singing moments.”

In between these two optics, he packs a 35mm f/1.8G, 50mm f/1.4D, and 85mm f/1.4G; he might also bring along a Lensbaby or fisheye, depending on the act. Actually, his version of the 35mm is a DX-format lens, made for cameras with APS-C sensors, which he uses on his full-frame camera. “This is one of my secret weapons for low-light concert photography,” Muir says. “It focuses fast and accurately, but there is significant vignetting in daylight—so I only use this lens wide open in dark rooms where you typically can’t even notice the darkened corners. Because it’s cheap—$200—I don’t mind beating it up. I’ve replaced it three times rather than get it repaired. It really is capable of a unique look.” In fact, his LCD Soundsystem photo was taken with this lens.

Witlen also brings a big bag of gear to large shows when he is working either in the pit or from the soundboard, another typical position for pros. A Canon shooter, he uses both the EOS 5D Mark III and the older Mark II. His typical kit includes Canon’s 14mm f/2.8L, original 16–35mm f/2.8, 28mm f/2.8 IS, 50mm f/1.2L, 85mm f/1.2L, and 70–200mm f/2.8L IS EF lenses. He also always brings along a beloved old Sigma 24mm f/2.8 AF Super Wide II from his film days, which works with his digital cameras only at f/2.8; when his first one finally broke, he immediately replaced it with one he bought on eBay.

“Because lighting designers like to use so much purple and red, I like to shoot no higher than ISO 800,” Witlen says. These colors often prove particularly subject to image noise at higher sensor sensitivities. With the 5D Mark III, he can shoot at up to ISO 6400 and still get images clean enough to suit his style.

Of course, few music photographers can get away with hauling all that gear into a big venue. Ticket holders can expect to be screened, and carrying a DSLR or even an interchangeable-lens compact camera, even without extra lenses, may be forbidden. In cases like this, an advanced compact with a good sensor and telephoto zoom makes the most sense. Top choices include the Panasonic Lumix LX100, with a Four Thirds sensor and 24–75mm (full-frame equivalent) f/1.7–2.8 lens, and the Sony Cyber-shot RX100 III, with a 1-inch sensor and 24–70mm (equivalent) f/1.8 lens. Both of these cameras have nice built-in electronic viewfinders for steadier shooting without annoying neighbors with a big, glowing LCD.

A Giant Dog during their Panache Booking Showcase at Beerland in Austin, TX. Shot on assignment for Rolling Stone.

Getting Personal

At smaller venues, the rules are very different. Wide-angle and normal focal lengths predominate—who needs a telephoto lens when you can get up close? Even when they’re working a midsize concert hall, the pros we spoke with try to get into the crowd.

This often means shooting with a smaller, more discreet camera than usual. Muir, for example, often uses a Sony Alpha a7S and sets it for an entirely silent shutter, a boon in intimate club settings. He also enjoys using his Fujifilm X100S, with its fixed 35mm lens. “It’s not about being secretive,” he says. “But I like not to be ostentatious. The last thing I want to be is distracting or in the way of people who are there to enjoy the music.” If he’s using his Nikon D750, Muir may pack only his 35mm and 85mm primes, and then just pick the ideal position for both the show and the focal length. “It’s an attitude more than the size of the camera—I don’t want to be the guy who ruins it for the person standing in back of me.”

Like Muir, Witlen always brings a camera, even when he buys a ticket and enjoys the show like any other fan. Of course, it helps that he’s already on good terms with concert producers such as Live Nation and with the publicists for the bands he likes. But for these shows, often at smaller venues, he usually keeps his 14mm on his camera and slips Canon’s little 40mm f/2.8 STM pancake lens into his pocket. “I’m shocked that a lens this size can be so sharp, fast, and quiet,” he says. “And it takes a beating.”

In fact, having gear that can take abuse is a must for any music photographer who gets into the action. “If you saw what my 14mm looked like!” Witlen says with a laugh. “The lens hood is dented and scratched, though it doesn’t interfere with my field of view.”

Asked how he got those battle scars, he describes following the hardcore band Gallows in 2009 as they hopped a barricade to play amid the throng. “I was shooting the lead singer as he lifted his mic stand—it hit the lens hood. In the same instant, the guitarist accidentally hit the lens hood with his guitar. I quickly assessed the lens to be fully functional and continued to shoot. The photo ended up becoming a double truck in the Soundselect section of Spin.”

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By now, everyone knows that sales of compact cameras have plummeted under the onslaught of smartphones, with their incredible convenience and increasing picture quality. But camera makers have come out with a slew of new compacts aimed at serious photographers who want big-camera capabilities without the bulk or bother of changing lenses.

The latest advanced compacts range from more consumer-oriented models such as Canon’s PowerShot G7 X, with a 1-inch sensor, and Panasonic’s Four Thirds–sensor Lumix DMC-LX100, to specialty APS-C models more likely to appeal to connoisseurs, such as Sigma’s dp Quattro series and Leica’s X and X-E. Fujifilm released an option at each end of the sensor spectrum: the X30, with a 2/3-inch sensor, and the X100T, with an APS-C-size chip. Sony also has a growing series of compacts with 1-inch sensors, the most recent of which is the Cyber-shot RX100 III, released last spring. Prices? Between $600 and $2,300.

These join an impressive list of big-sensor compact cameras that came out in 2013 and are still on the market (though they may be phased out soon), including the Fujifilm X100S, Leica X2, Nikon Coolpix A, Ricoh GR, and Sigma DP Merrill series—all with APS-C-size imagers—and the Sony Cyber-shot RX1, still the only full-frame compact out there.

This all presents a wealth of solid choices for photographers who want a terrific take-it-everywhere camera to fit in a jacket pocket or a purse. Here are some of the factors to consider.

Image Sensor and Picture Quality

You might guess that the larger the sensor, the higher the resolution. But that’s not always true. For instance, in the controlled and uniform conditions of the Popular Photography Test Lab, our sister publication measured higher resolution in low-ISO images from Sigma’s dp2 Quattro, which has an APS-C-size Foveon X3 sensor, than from Sony’s full-frame RX1. And while Nikon’s Coolpix A, with an APS-C sensor, out-resolved Panasonic’s Four Thirds–format Lumix LX100 in lab tests, it did so only by the slimmest of margins.

Some of these differences may stem from the variation in pixel counts, and not just from their size; different processing both in RAW image capture and in the company’s default RAW-to-TIFF conversion settings may also play a role. In real-world shooting and processing, photographers will most likely be delighted with the level of resolving power that any of these compacts provide, especially when used in bright light.

Image noise can become more of a limiting factor in the picture quality of compact cameras, especially at high ISOs. Generally, the smaller the camera body and the higher the density of pixels on the sensor, the more noise will show up. That may be one reason that Panasonic kept the LX100’s pixel count down to 12.8 megapixels—Pop Photo‘s lab tests rated its noise Extremely Low at ISO 800 and below, and it didn’t hit an Unacceptable rating until the camera’s top sensitivity of ISO 25,600. In the same tests, the Canon G7 X, with 20.2MP on a 1-inch sensor, hit the Unacceptable level at ISO 6400, and the Sigma dp2 Quattro, which spreads 29 effective megapixels on its unique three-layer Foveon, got there by ISO 400.

Zoom Lenses Versus Fixed Focal Lengths

Compacts with smaller sensors can accommodate zooms, whereas those with APS-C-size chips and larger only sport lenses with a fixed focal length. All of them have fast maximum apertures to bring in lots of light, and most the prime lenses have manual focus rings for precise control.

The zooms you’ll find on these compacts aren’t monsters—the Canon G7 X has the biggest range, a modest 4.2X for a full-frame equivalent of 24–100mm. But they cover all the most useful focal lengths and strike a nice balance between versatility and size.

Nearly all the new APS-C cameras stick with a wide-angle prime equivalent to 35mm on a full-frame. The sole exception is Sigma. With its dp Quattro line (like the DP Merrill line before it), it offers three different fixed focal lengths: 28mm (equivalent) on the dp1 and 45mm on the dp2; 75mm will turn up on the dp3 in 2015.

In the end it’s a tradeoff whose worth you’ll need to decide for yourself: a smaller sensor for more reach, or the purity of a single focal length and the possibility of a shallower depth of field.

Basic and Special Features

All of these cameras offer tons of cool shooting modes and tricks for in-camera processing. But three features will probably matter most to photographers: their viewfinder, video capabilities, and Wi-Fi connectivity. The first used to be standard on cameras, but is no longer; the second has become par for the course; and the third is catching on fast.

About half these new compacts—the Canon and both the Leicas and Sigmas—lack viewfinders. For framing, you have to either use the LCD screen or buy an accessory finder. (That is, if one exists for your system—Leica’s current EVF is expensive and disappointingly slow and grainy; Sigma’s is just coming out now and we haven’t had a chance to try it yet.)

Those cameras that do have built-in finders have made these electronic models so sharp and fast that few shooters will miss a glass finder. Fujifilm has both: With the hybrid finder on its X100T, it provides both a clear optical rangefinder and a high-resolution EVF with a host of capabilities, including digital split-screen for manual focusing. Sony put a cool pop-up OLED EVF in the RX100.

As for video, Full HD (1920×1080) capture at frame rates of up to 60 frames per second has pretty much become standard—you’ll find it on all but the Leica X-E and the Sigma dp Quattro line. The Panasonic LX100 goes further, shooting 4K video directly to an SD card, though not to an exterior recorder through HDMI.

Then there’s Wi-Fi for direct wireless image transfer and remote control. Once again, the Leicas and Sigmas go without.

Size, Form, and Handling

Finally, you need to consider the size of these cameras, how they feel in your hands, and the design of the controls, grip, LCD screen, and other elements. None of these compacts are made to slip into the pocket of your jeans, but they are all easy enough to carry all the time. The Leica X weighs the most, just over a pound; the little Sony RX100 III comes in under 10.25 ounces. Be careful when looking at published specs for a camera’s size, because the dimensions listed usually describe only the body. The lens can add a fair amount of bulk.

But you’ll likely care more about how a camera handles than about its size. All of these cameras put controls of most common settings on dials, buttons, and switches, but their layouts differ, and you may wind up surprised by what sends you rooting through menus. The shapes of their grips differ, too, from the strong angle of the Sigma dp Quattro line to the subtle ridge of the Fujifilm X30 to the flat front of the Sony and the Leicas.

If you’re buying a compact as a gift, chances are you won’t go wrong with any of these cameras. But the best way to choose for yourself is to play with a few of them and decide which factors are most important to you. You may quickly find yourself leaving your phone in your pocket and using an actual camera.

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Sony announced the latest updated body in its Alpha 7 line, the A7S II, a month ago, but it wasn’t until last night that the company offered the U.S. a chance to shoot with final production samples of this full-frame mirrorless interchangeable-lens compact (ILC) camera. The “S” in the name stands for sensitivity, and that’s just what the new 12.2MP 35mm-format CMOS sensor turns up, with ISO reaching 409,600.

Sony added 14-bit uncompressed RAW, though you’ll still be able to save file space with the compressed RAW format available in the higher-resolution A7R II. The camera captures 4K video internally—no external recorder needed. There are lots of other features that distinguish this $2,998 (street, body only) camera, but with just a couple of hours in our hands, so far, Philip Ryan and I decided to concentrate on the characteristic that sets the A7S II apart: low-light performance.

We used it with a variety of lenses at a press event Sony hosted at Carroll Place Bar and Restaurant in Greenwich Village and then out on the streets, cranking up the ISO and engaging Sony’s five-axis image stabilization. All of the images in this gallery are JPEGs straight out of the camera with no editing, shot handheld.

We’ll run the Sony A7S II through our full gamut of tests in the Popular Photography Test Lab and in the field as soon as we have a sample we can keep for a few weeks. (Check back here in November!)

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“Take a few moments, even take a step back, and think about what you’re trying to say with your photo. It should always tell a story or convey a message—it should say something,” says Ron Cunniff. The technology consultant credits our Mentor Series with teaching him this fundamental principle, and with it, transforming his photography.

His photo of a limestone formation in Wisconsin’s Upper Dells proves the point. The day was overcast and the light bright but flat; Cunniff calls the color in his original capture “very blah.” He solved this problem by converting it to black-and-white, and he cropped it square to omit a small building up on the bluff. “The words of wisdom from Mentors that apply are ‘Don’t put your camera away just because the lighting and other conditions aren’t perfect,’” he says. “Too many people I know do that. To me, the changing light just changes the story the picture tells.”

Another tip he learned from the Mentor Series: “Sometimes it’s better to turn around and face the opposite direction, because you never know what’s behind you.” He adds, “Don’t just shoot the popular subject—step back and survey the whole area, because the most prominent subject might not be the most interesting.”

The biggest lesson he’s learned: “Don’t be afraid of using artificial light,” Cunniff says. This goes even for landscapes and other outdoor shots. “Many of the interesting things that I’ve added to my kit have been the simple things: little reflectors or little gels to put on top of my flashes,” he adds. “I have four strobes in my pack now—adding little bits of light here and there has changed a snapshot into a really great image.”

Ron Cunniff of Davie, FL, is a technical evangelist for photographers.

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With twin passions for travel and photography, Jill Mazur, a consultant in the apparel and footwear industry with clients throughout the United States, jokes that she’s actually based in LAX. But Los Angeles’s bustling airport is a world away from the tiny workshop in Maras, Peru, where she trained her lens on a hat maker plying his craft. The room was so small that only two or three of the photographers she’d journeyed with could enter at a time.

Mazur captured the chiaroscuro effect using just a beam of light through the open door. Other shots showed more of the background, but when she captured this one she knew it was the keeper. That’s because she composes carefully in the camera, a habit instilled by a childhood spent shooting film with her photojournalist father. Her best tip? “Look at all of the edges and corners within your viewfinder,” she says. “As I’m shooting, I’m looking to get exactly the image I want.”

But even for this experienced traveling shooter, our Mentor Series offers the chance to tap a rich vein of knowledge. She cites mentor Mark Alberhasky’s dictum (paraphrasing Louis Pasteur) that chance favors the prepared mind: “When I’m out shooting now, I’m always ready.” Knowing her camera—and keeping the power on and the lens cap off—enables her to capture moments she once would have missed.

At the end of each shooting day, the trekkers and Mentors get together for a slide show and critique. “I learn more sitting in these reviews than I could ever get from a book,” Mazur says. “I love the treks, but the Mentors themselves are so good—I’ve learned a lot from every single one of them.”

Jill Mazur, 46, is an L.A.-based consultant. See her photos at flickr.com/jillmazur. Photo: Reed Hoffmann

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Brash, direct, in the middle of the action. That’s how you’d describe the work of Larry Fink from his high-contrast, flash-fueled party photographs, his candid glimpses backstage at fashion shows, or his first book, Social Graces (Aperture, 1984), a study in the contrasting social rituals of upper-crust New Yorkers and rural Pennsylvanians in the 1970s.

But Fink, who teaches photography at Bard College, unveiled another dimension to his work with the publication earlier this year of Opening the Sky. This cloth-bound hardcover was published by Stanley/Barker last summer, but the photographs date to 1980, when he was offered a grant by the Seattle Art Museum to explore any subject that struck his fancy, as long as it was in Washington State.

As Fink writes in a Beat-inflected essay in the book, “The logger in me allowed a natural transition to photograph the rugged breed of men who selectively pillaged the deep, virgin forest.” Off he went to the Olympic Peninsula for three months to chronicle the life and work of a “gypo” (freelance) logger named David McCardle and an “old guy” named Olaf, “who had an addiction to cameras who needed a poetic eye.”

After the trip, Fink filed his film away for decades. Now that this astonishing body of work has finally been published, we were eager to speak with him about it. Here is a lightly edited transcript of his conversation with American Photo‘s editor-in-chief Miriam Leuchter about this dispatch from what he called “the bellicose hills of the logging community.”

When I first looked at this book, I said, “Holy moly! This is Larry Fink?” I don’t think of you in a rural area, even though you live on a farm and your real life is a much more rural experience than your work implies. Or the work for which we know you implies.

Well, you know, Social Graces, it was the first big banger, and half of that book is rural. It doesn’t appear to be rural in the sense of any kind of pastoral. Basically they’re inside houses and at parties. So even though class-wise and emotionally they’re very different from the black-tie folks, there’s no observation of what’s happening in nature. But it was photographed out in the country.

So how did you arrive at this?

I’d had a show of the Social Graces stuff at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978. When the call came from the Seattle Art Museum to go out and photograph anything I wanted to I was somewhat paralyzed by my success. Everybody was talking and blah blah blahing and asking “Do you want to repeat yourself?” For somebody who was essentially thinking about the revolution and underground behavior, all of a sudden to be on top of the mob, without necessarily being ambitious to do that—it was surprise that John Sarkowski gave me the show. In fact, before that I had felt, in my political naïveté, that I wouldn’t take a show at any museum like that because it was, you know, the establishment. And then when I got it, of course, I was overjoyed. [laughs]

Amazing how that happens.

Yeah. And it went on for quite a while. I used to lurk around the halls of the show, and I found out that the museum was the best place—fuck the idea of the Establishment! People came in there, and you really got whatever your ideas or your visions were disseminated to a vast group of the population, and that’s what you intended to do. So [the logging project] was right in the midst of all that kind of very confused thinking from a left-wing, on-the-ground character…it was a great escape.

It sounds like an amazing adventure.

Oh, it was unbelievable! The people at the arts council in Seattle set me up with this guy Davey McCardle, who was a gypo logger—a freelance logger. He was a small, wiry, very smart guy. He and I lived together for three months out there on the trails and on the roads. We took another guy, Olaf, who was kind of an amateur photographer, and we piled into this old Bronco and off we went. It was fabulous. I was married then to Joan Snyder, the great painter, and after the first month she was getting pissed at me for not being around. [Laughs]

I would think it was an opportunity for her to get a lot done.

I would think so too, and she was pretty independent that way—she was certainly no wilting flower of a woman—but nevertheless she had some conventional ideas about what a husband should do and it gave us no end of resource for irritation, for sure.

Afterward, how did this work come to not be seen for all this time? You said, “Well, I did that,” and put it away?

Yeah, that’s it. I was always like that. I have a lot of bodies of work that are just coming out now because I’m bringing them out. I always just did it or whatever —I wasn’t of the mind like [Ralph] Gibson or Danny Lyon or all those guys who were whelping up against the establishment by self-publishing books. I didn’t feel the singular urgency to get my work out there. Partially it was political because I felt that important things, if they were important at all, would take their import over a longer period of time. It wasn’t about Larry getting his work out there—my philosophical position was that I was part of a bigger thing, which was the human struggle. And I could just let things go by and set them down.

Now, I developed that work of mine, all the party stuff and like that, and people had gotten me so into that party box that nobody knew anything of my work at all except the party box, which is unbelievably good work, but it was getting me sick. So I said, “OK, let’s get clear.” And we put out The Beats [in 2014] and now this logger thing, and there will probably some be more things about New York in the ’60s which people haven’t seen, and all kinds of stuff that’s still in the file.

My natural next question was going to be “Why now? What changed for you?” But it seems like you’ve already answered that.

Well, I wanted to share it because some of the work is so beautiful. And it’s also history, it’s about a time that’s gone by. Especially this logging community—I mean, gosh, the woods are imperiled now by fire, the economy has changed quite some for the timber industry, all kinds of yelling and noise about clear-cutting and stuff, and rightly so. But I wasn’t concerned about that, I was just concerned with the nobility and the struggle of these guys.

It sounds like it was very much a political statement for you—the way in which you photographed these men and your engagement with them and their work. Yeah. I could have gone off and photographed, not like Robert Adams but like clear-cutting and all kinds of ecological concerns, but I don’t generally get into polemics. I just pretty much see what’s in front of me and honor it, or try to pick it apart. But with these logging guys it’s about honoring them. These guys are America. This is history.

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