article – Ming Thein | Photographer

Thoughts and advice for those considering a career in photography

February 20, 2013 By Ming Thein 59 Comments

Advance warning and disclaimer: I do not by any means claim to be an expert or old hand here, just offering my two cents (severely depreciated after foreign exchange fees and post-subprime recession currency devaluation) for those aspiring professional photographers. And by professional, I mean ‘makes most or all of their income for photography or photography related activities’.

Rather, I speak from the point of view of somebody whose professional aspirations started years ago, went through a series of abrupt attempts, starts and stops and encountered much frustration along the way. My regular readers will know that I’ve only managed to make this work since about a year ago; my position in the industry still feels rather tenuous at times, and I’ll be the first to admit that there are still occasional moments of doubt where I wonder if a) this is sustainable, and b) where it’s going in the long term. Perhaps the definition of success is when one stops having self-doubt (or perhaps that’s a sign of losing touch with reality and running the risk of losing it altogether).

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: advice, article, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, thein, turning pro

General photographic workflow tips

February 18, 2013 By Ming Thein 16 Comments

Whilst it would be impossible to cover absolutely everything you need to know to be proficient in photography in a single article, the aim of today’s piece is to provide the amateur to hobbyist an idea of the things to keep in mind in order to be able to focus on producing images. It’s something that’s been quite frequently requested in the past few weeks – perhaps a sign that my reader base may be shifting somewhat – so I’ve decided to take a crack at it in a way that makes it both accessible yet still somewhat relevant for the more advanced photographer. Where applicable, the section header links to a more detailed article. I’ll approach this from a in the same sequence as I’d normally deal with my own photographic workflow, in a sort of annotated checklist format.

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, essay, how to, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photography, thein, workflow

What makes a good photographer?

February 9, 2013 By Ming Thein 38 Comments

Frequently asked, but rarely answered is the question of what makes a good photograph; rarely, if ever, asked is ‘what makes a good photographer?‘ In the first place, does it matter? I think the answer is yes, both because of the importance of self-assessment in the grand scheme of things if you want to continually improve as a photographer, and because we can all benefit from a goal to aim for. Obviously, the answer to this question is going to depend very much on the type of photographer you want to be; being loud, brash and in-your-face might serve you well as a paparazzo, but it’s almost certainly going to result in early retirement if you’re a war photographer.

However, before examining those details – and I’m only going to write on the genres of photography I’m somewhat familiar with (please feel free to weigh in under the comments section if you have any further thoughts or experiences to share) – there are definitely some general traits that are beneficial to all photographers, and we’ll examine those first.

Maintaining your creative edge

February 3, 2013 By Ming Thein 28 Comments

The obvious question would be, why? If you’re already happy shooting in whatever style it is you’re shooting, why bother to push or do something different? Why not just continue to refine within your niche? Actually, the more I think about it, the more I don’t think it’s an obvious or trivial consideration. There is definitely value to be the best in your chosen field at any one particular task or technique; perhaps you specialize palladium contact prints, or gigapixel HDR, or cameraphone photography. After a while of doing this, and only this, you will almost certainly know all there is to know, and keep up with any current developments in the field – assuming you don’t get bored of it after several years.

For example, I shoot watches – both for personal pleasure, and for a living. I’ve done literally hundreds, if not thousands, of the things – and each watch from multiple angles. Sometimes I’ll do an extended study of one particular piece and land up with hundreds of images. I’ve tried a lot of different formats and techniques, and hell, even put them inside X-ray machines. I suppose you could say I’m a bit of an expert at it. But if I do the same thing again and again, even with slight variations on a theme, my photographs will become formulaic and boring* – regardless of the subject. Clearly, some experimentation and variety is needed – this continual evolution and difference is what I like to think of as the creative edge.

*Ironically, if you’re shooting for a large client that already has a pre-determined corporate style or look, variation is the last thing they generally want. Hence we reach a dilemma: most pros will shoot in a particular style which is either demanded by the client or what they’re known for; as a result, they creatively stagnate, and when the agency suddenly decides that it wants something fresh, the poor incumbent photographer is unable to delivery simply because he or she has been doing the same thing for the last ten years and doesn’t know how to restart that creative machinery anymore. It is therefore very important for pros especially to keep pushing, even if only for their personal work – the ability to access this process of experimentation will almost certainly come in useful in future.

I think we need to decouple creativity from expertise. Expertise is the ability to handle any given situation and execute the desired result; creativity is the process required to conceptualize and visualize that result in the first place. The two are not the same; they can be linked or not. You can have a creative eye but not know how to capture the angle you see, or you can know all there is to know about camera operation, but be unable to see compositions even if they came pre-framed. It is therefore of paramount importance to nurture both.

So far, my articles on this site have dealt almost exclusively with the technical expertise portion; we did dip occasionally into the hows and whys and philosophies of composition, but these forays still ultimately boil down to trying to shoehorn the process into a set of repeatable, consistent rules. Creativity is far more nebulous than that. It relies on seeing something different in the ordinary, which in turn relies on the observer/ photographer having that different point of view in the first place; this can be physical or interpretative. The former is fairly straightforward – get a ladder, or a wider lens, for example. The latter is far more complex, and a product of one’s personal biases, which are created as a result of one’s life experience and everything else you might have gone through in the course of your life.

There are therefore two obvious ways to push one’s creativity: change your physical perspective, or change your personal biases. The former is easy – go out and shoot with an unfamiliar focal length, or with the camera on a pole, or on the ground, or perhaps a different aspect ratio. It’s one of the reasons why people like new gear so much: it gives you a different perspective, and in turn inspires you to get out and shoot something different. But of course, this wears off after a while, and you go back to being bored or shooting in your usual style. Hopefully though, the burst of inspiration lasts long enough for you to incorporate some of what you tried – and liked – into your instinctive ‘baseline’ style. I admit I do this a lot: half of the gear I buy, I buy because I need its particular function for an assignment; the other half I buy because it looks interesting and makes me want to go out and shoot with it – film falls squarely into this category.

Does it work? For the most part, I’d say yes; sometimes the effects last longer than others, though. Sometimes you’re stymied by lack of new material, which really forces you to either take a long, hard look at the things you’ve perhaps already shot to find a new angle, or just get out of your comfort zone geographically.

The second, and much more difficult method of stimulating one’s inspirational juices involves changing your point of view, and altering your biases. The easiest way to do this is look at other people’s images – photographs, after all, are a representation of the way the photographer sees the world; the more different viewpoints you can amass, the more ideas you can get for different perspectives of your own. The internet has made this easy; I’m suggesting looking at serious work on flickr or 1x or whatever your favorite social media site is; avoid Facebook, Instagram and the like because firstly there tends to be a huge amount of thoughtless crap posted, and even if it’s not thoughtless crap, then the presentation method compresses the hell out of the image and generally kills any subtlety deliberately put there by the photographer. The portfolios of other pros are a mixed bag – some are good, some are cliched, some are formulaic. And some are old work – which reminds me, I need to update mine at some point.

Books and exhibitions are the other good method – you can see examples of why the greats were great, and take your time to understand and decompose their vision. Exhibitions can be hit and miss. During the Tokyo workshop, I took my students though a couple of shows at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; both to show them what was out there and hopefully stimulate a little creativity, as much as to instil a sense of how to assess an image and figure out what works and what doesn’t. The latter is important: feedback is the only way you’re going to know if your creative experiments are going in the right direction or not.

Since for most of you photography is a hobby rather than a profession, you need to be happy with your own output. Be honest with yourself: do you like the new direction the experiments are taking? Why? Why not? What specifically is different to your old style of shooting, and how can you incorporate these elements into future compositions? Of course, you need some sort of framework to assess relative merit in the first place – I recommend starting with this article on what makes an outstanding image.

The second part of feedback is having some sort of peer group – one that’s at a similar level to you skill-wise, and has no hidden agenda or incentive to see your work stagnate – a wedding pro should probably not seek the advice of other wedding pros in his area and price bracket, for instance. Watch for reactions and body language rather than what they’re actually saying: a lot of the time, the English language simply lacks the vocabulary to describe some of what we’re seeing. Body language, on the other hand, is much harder to disguise and conveys quite succinctly whether first impressions are of liking or revulsion.

Finally, if you can, seek the opinion of a ‘mentor’ – I use that term loosely because it doesn’t have to be a formal teaching relationship (though if you’re serious about learning, I highly recommend my Email School of Photography) – but it should be somebody who’s both at a higher skill level, and has the ability to communicate in about images in a way that’s both easily understandable, and hopefully gives you some sort of constructive, actionable feedback. Even more ideally, they should shoot similar subjects to you so you can use their work as a point of reference.

The higher up the skill chain you go, the higher the expectations: experimentation can be daunting because it may produce some very visible failures. (I admit, this was one of my main initial hangups about revisiting film; simply, what if the images looked like crap and didn’t match the standards I’d already set both here and professionally?) You can either take things in small steps – like say shooting an aperture-priority film M alongside your M9 – or dive in the deep end and make the learning curve as steep as possible (go medium format without a meter and develop your own). The latter may not give you the creative kick you need, the former may put you off because there are simply too many variables to control – I distinctly remember my first experience with a V-series Hasselblad was not a pleasant one; everything simply felt ‘off’.

Bottom line: you have to want to do it. Sometimes overcoming that mental block can be the hardest step of all.

In the course of thinking and researching this article, I spent some time talking to and corresponding with people in other various art disciplines – music, painting, writing – all creatives face similar challenges, I think. As a photographer, my instinctive reaction to the need to find inspiration was to look within my own discipline; for the others, they go outside: the musicians also paint, the painters also write poetry, and the writers are also photographers**. Of course, what they’re doing is merely creating a different point of view – albeit a very different one, which may or may not pay creative dividends later. I suppose the greatest inspirations come from going ever wider outside your field, as the field gets more and more populated.

**To some extent, I’ve already done this with painting, but perhaps I haven’t gone far enough. Here I was thinking that shooting architecture and still lifes would help my watch photography – perhaps I should be drawing buildings instead.

I think I’m going to have to explore this concept more. I’ve always had a particularly odd feeling when listening to a song, on my own, which I’d previously listened to a lot in another period of my life; it’s vaguely melancholic and reminiscent, but at the same time, not; there’s this strange temporal disconnect you experience because your surroundings clearly put you in the here and now, yet your mind feels as though it’s elsewhere^. It invariably happens when I’m driving, almost always at night. Now – here’s the inspiration part – what if I could somehow translate that into a photograph? MT

^Discourse on the nonlinearity of time should probably be left for another essay.

Note: the images used to illustrate this essay are representative of various creative ‘breaks’ I’ve had in my photographic career – experimentations with other styles or inspirations that have caused fundamental shifts in the way I see, and the way I shoot.

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, challenge, creative edge, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, philosophy, thein

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: the relativity of aesthetics, and a (partial) reconciliation with hipstagram-things

January 30, 2013 By Ming Thein 36 Comments

A slight inclination for coffee. This image goes against so many of my personal rules – the horizons are slanted, the main subject is out of focus, and very out of focus, and the light is so-so – but I like it. The important question here is, why?

This is an old carrot: it’s been used to lead the same set of donkeys around the garden path so many times that the donkey himself doesn’t even believe it he’s ever going to get to eat it anymore, at least not deep down in its heart of hearts. But I think it’s still a topic worth discussing because relativity affects people in many more ways than they are conscious of; and being conscious of what works for you and what doesn’t is of course a very, very important part of making strong images, and moreover, ensuring those images are in a style that’s consistent and reflective of the personality of the photographer. (And of course the latter exploration and understanding of one’s personal style is important because following what comes naturally to you makes it much easier to develop and evolve as a photographer.)

Of course, what we’re really talking about here is relativity: everybody has a different point of reference. If you’ve never left Saharan Africa, then the concept of a suit would seem rather foreign to you; but if you came from an upper-class English family, you’ve probably owned one since you could walk. Hence the roots of relativity: an observers’ – let’s leave photography out of this for now, because it introduces some additional complications – personal taste is defined much by the familiar, be that good or bad. For the most part, people are naturally curious to varying degrees. Add that to the mix, and preferences can start to vary wildly: just because it’s not familiar doesn’t mean that it isn’t good or favorable, and just because it is doesn’t mean that it isn’t extremely distasteful – think of teenage rebellion, for instance. (I’m told by a psychologist that a good portion of teenage rebels grow out of that stage fairly quickly and land up turning into their parents in middle age; it’s the silent, too-good types we have to worry about.)

The attractiveness of a piece of art is of course purely a function of personal taste; art is inherently controversial simply because of the sheer number of potential forms it can take. By definition, almost anything can be art – be it completely familiar, or completely not. To a limited extent, the same goes for photography. However, because of the nature of the medium, there are more constrained limits the artist has to operate within – you’re (mostly) stuck in two dimensions, cannot use moving imagery, have finished work that is (today) viewed at many reproduction sizes, and (again, today) is affected by the quality of the viewing device. Making it worse, is the fact that it’s perhaps the medium with the highest diminishing returns; it takes no skill to take a photograph, and not much more to luck out and produce a good one if you take enough of them. Yet to do so consistently and in a way that’s fully controlled is incredibly difficult because of the sheer number of variables that one has to deal with, often in a very short space of time.

Perhaps it’s this medium-induced limitation that has meant photography in the early days took some time to be taken seriously as proper art form in its own right; imitation of reality was always the intention, but until relatively recently, the results were but a poor facsimile. The same of course cannot be said for art, because nobody expects a painting or sculpture to be a copy of the original subject, but an interpretation of the subject as seen and translated by the artist. In reality, what this means is that the photographer’s primary tool of control is subject and composition, and to some extent the reproduction method – this includes format, color and output. The difference between a fairly good photographer and a truly oustanding one can be subtle, and I’m of the opinion you can’t really tell if you only see one image: it’s simply too easy to get lucky. Repeatability and demonstrable control is not to be underestimated.

And here we run into a bit of a dilemma: what if a lack of control is the desired output? What if some degree of uncontrolled randomness is a signature of the artist? (I personally don’t find it appealing, but I suppose this is one of the reasons Lomos and Holgas have become popular in recent times, along with the digital-fake hipstagram-alikes.) This of course is personal taste too: taking off my photographer hat and putting on one belonging to an objective commentator, it’s important to recognize that whilst I might not personally like putting artificial light leaks and scratches onto my cameraphone images to disguise poor composition and hand shake, there are a lot of people who find it appealing – hence the success of such products.

But is there anything inherently wrong with it? A recent – let’s say heated – discussion with my wife over her use of instagram has lead me to seriously consider this question. Whilst deep down it offends my artistic sensibilities greatly to even consider using such things, I admit that I cannot think of a single objective reason against it. But why am I against it? My full (and definitely not-objective) thoughts can be found in this article, but the gist is that basically you’re outsourcing a large chunk of the creative decision making to the preferences of a third party; worse still, all of your images will have the same style and look as everybody else who uses the same program. By nature, it’s designed to make images look like something they’re not. It’s the integrity of the thing – or specifically, the lack of it – that really irks me. The fact that some of those looks were products of a certain workflow or method that was developed, learned over time and refined; earned, if you will. Yet now they’re being adopted and trivialized by a bunch of hipsters who have no clue that Tri-X is a film, or Rodinal comes in bottles.

Let’s back up a minute, and be objective again. The two core points in that argument are really hokum: firstly, that one is in total creative control of the photographic process from end to end; secondly, that one has to earn the right to use a method or technique through understanding and practice. By that flawed logic, I shouldn’t have the right to use a camera unless I grind my own lenses made out of glass I fused myself from sand I collected off a beach somewhere, with optical formulae I derived myself, coupled to a camera I made myself, with either film whose emulsion I concocted out of household chemicals, or a sensor whose chip pattern I photolithographed from a hand-drawn mask and a projector. And I can’t use Photoshop unless I wrote the program myself, either. Clearly, this is utter crap.

I can prefer to take over some elements of the process because they give me more creative control over elements that matter to me; postprocessing or developing, for instance. But whilst I might prefer a Distagon design to a Sonnar, there’s no way I’m going to go out and make myself one. I think the cutoff in this process is generally the point where you can no longer do a better job than the third party – be it in processing, or lens design. But preferences change this: whist we may get better results if we sent our film off to a pro lab, or avoided mucking around with retina-searing HDR and just using our camera’s expanded dynamic range JPEGs, we might prefer to do it for whatever reason – personal accomplishment or satisfaction, learning, or perhaps something else. I suppose it’s just like how most drivers would be faster with a double-clutch gearbox or a modern automatic, but might still prefer a stick for the feel and experience.

This preference – subjectivity – extends of course to equipment, images, compositions and subjects, too. We use certain types of cameras because we prefer to, either because of the way they make us feel, or because somebody we respect says they’re the best, or because we simply want to. Cameras that seem masochistic, ugly and antiquated to some – meterless Hasselblads come to mind – might be really quite enjoyable to others (me, for instance).

It’s of some critical importance to a photographer to understand both what they like, but also why it appeals. This exploration upfront saves a lot of time both in avoiding exploring creative avenues that might later prove to be dead ends, but also helps hone artistic development by focusing on the elements or subjects that feel inherently natural and instinctive to the creator. There’s no point in forcing yourself to try and replicate somebody else’s style if it doesn’t come naturally to you, or shooting with a wideangle lens if you natively see normal or telephoto compositions. It might be worth trying it as an experiment, but why bother if you simply know you don’t like the way the images look? Now, if you knew that it was because you didn’t like the diminished background or lack of depth of field separation or the keystone distortion when you point the camera in any orientation away from the horizon, then you could avoid buying that lens and wasting three months shooting with it in mild dissatisfaction instead of just enjoying that 85/1.4 and making cinematic.

Bottom line: look at lots of images in a wide variety of styles; it’s likely that you’ll find some you like the look of, but it’s also likely that none of them will be a perfect fit for your own personal preferences. You’ll just have to understand which elements about them you do like, as much as which you don’t; the next step is to translate this into a technical how – if it’s not obvious, then find yourself a mentor or friend. (My Email School of Photography is designed precisely to help with this.) This will in turn help focus your own work on honing the skills you need to make the images you want, or if you’ve already got those skills, then on the elements and subjects that you prefer. Quite often, it’s not the how that needs the kick: it’s exposure that’s required – of course, how the balance lies is down to where you stand in the creative stages of evolution as a photographer.. I find it too easy to get shuttered down one’s own creative alley – even if you have a good idea of what works for you – which in turn closes off potential ideas and developments.

Closing with a full circle, I want to talk about why I like the opening image: it’s because from the viewer’s point of view, it throws you a bit off balance, and draws you into the details of the scene to understand and give context to the image as a whole. Did it have a caption originally? No, none of my images ever do, but this one seemed somewhat appropriate. It was made with unfamilar equipment in an unfamiliar location – a mall at night, with a Hasselblad 501C and CFV-39 digital back at high ISO – not exactly my first choice for this kind of work. Yet I’m reasonably pleased with the outcome, despite it disagreeing with most of my cherished tenets. Metaphorically, look around a little: force yourself to see the different, either vicariously or by putting yourself in an unfamiliar situation. It might just yield some unexpected results, but you’ll never know if you don’t stick your neck out in the first place. MT

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Enter the January 2012 black and white challenge – win a multispectral Sony NEX-5 B&W machine modified by yours truly!

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, relativity, thein

Rant on: Paypal woes, shy subjects and travel today

January 29, 2013 By Ming Thein 69 Comments

Royal lake at dawn, Yangon.

As of late last night, I just returned from four days in Yangon, Myanmar. Firstly, I apologize for any and all delays in replying email and messages; the internet was barely usable and it seemed that only iOS devices could access WordPress (but only the comments).

Slow internet I can live with. But what came next surprised and angered me. It seems that Myanmar – along with North Korea and Cuba – is on the list of countries sanctioned by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control and The Bank of England. If you try to access your Paypal account from one of these countries, it will be suspended and you will be forced to go through a lengthy and inconvenient process to reactivate it in order to access the funds in your account. Not only that, if you try to access it again, your account will be permanently closed and the funds seized. There are many, many problems here:

My account is with Paypal Malaysia, registered in Singapore. These controls do not apply as funds held here are not subject to either US or UK oversight. I am not a US citizen or green card holder and am not under the ageis of that government.
To reactivate your account, you have to prove your ID (fine) and that “the funds are not being used for the benefit of persons or organizations in Myanmar”. How the hell do you prove that if you’re an ordinary tourist who needs to pay for their hotel via Agoda, or air tickets, or something? I have a reasonably easy to find profile online and – obviously – this site, along with citations elsewhere, and I’m still being required to provide additional proof.
Within Paypal, the left and right hands are obviously not talking to each other – I’ve gotten emails from four different departments asking for different documents and informing me that my account will continue to be suspended until I provide said documents – it’s not clear who is handling what, and nobody on the phone can seem to tell me, either.
Customer service is a joke – it just doesn’t exist. And I’m supposed to be “a valued business customer” – all I know is that between international client payments, royalties, workshop payments, DVD sales I’ve had at least six figures go through there in the last year – which surely must be above average – and they’re still taking 24-48 hours just to reply to enquiries, let alone reactivate the account. Apparently it’s 48 hours to review documents, 48 hours to reply to you when you want to confirm the type of document they need, and another 48 hours to review again. In the intervening period, they’re happy to hold on to your money, deny you access and collect the interest.
It’s month end. I’ve got a number of automated royalty payments incoming which are now lost in the ether; Paypal doesn’t let you accept funds, either. And of course being automated, the remitting agencies won’t try again if the money is rejected; they’ll just keep it.
Closing somebody’s account and seizing funds without just cause or jurisdiction is simply illegal and unethical.
Of course, none of this would have happened if they’d simply told you what the countries on the banned list were and what the consequences might be before you tried to access your account.

Needless to say, if anybody knows of an easy online alternative to Paypal for accepting and sending money internationally, I’m voting with my wallet and taking my business elsewhere. It’s not the first time, either; if you don’t complain regularly, it seems they take their own sweet time releasing funds to your bank account – up to two weeks in the past – no doubt accumulating healthy overnight interest in the process. The company is a disgrace and operates without care or service for its customers or any ethics whatsoever.

I’m going to stop here and skip over Air Asia – uncleaned airplanes, inedible food, horrible-smelling air in the cabin being pumped in through the ducts, inhumane seat pitches and very little to no discounts over full price carriers once you factor everything else in, but have to use them because there are no seats left elsewhere – before I give myself a headache.

Yangon itself was quite pleasant: non-stop sunshine, warm (30C+) temperatures during the day – but relatively low humidity – cool evenings, and pedestrian-friendly. Lots of dust, though, and little to do after the sun goes down. For the most part, the Burmese seem to absolutely hate having their picture taken. Even with years of practiced stealth, almost never could I get a shot off without them noticing; in most cases, turning away or hiding their faces with something, too. I don’t know if it’s religious/ cultural or a hangover of something more sinister, but it certainly was photographically frustrating.

The city seems to have its fair share of tourist touts, too – from little kids who force things into your pockets then insist you have to pay them because you took their goods, to other little kids who force you to buy their plastic bags to store your shoes before you enter a temple or pagoda at an exorbitant price, to ‘monks’ who follow you around until you donate – that cannot possibly be part of the buddhist way – to the usual gamut of taxi ripoffs and ‘tourist-only’ fees. Hell, it costs US$60 to rent a sim card at the airport – and you have no choice because your mobile won’t roam. There’s no way I look local, so I just had to endure the hassling. It’s a shame, really, because the majority of regular Burmese are actually very warm and friendly people.

I’m off to hassle Paypal again once I’ve caught up with several hundred emails. As for images…when I get around to it…MT

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Filed Under: Off topic, On Assignment Tagged With: article, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, paypal, rant, thein

The pricing game

January 28, 2013 By Ming Thein 28 Comments

Just your regular headache.

Following on from an earlier article on understanding licensing, I thought it’d be instructive to spend some time on the remaining elephant in the room for any photographer – especially newly-minted ones – is the question of how much to charge. Attached to that comes the mechanics of it all: invoicing, accounting, collecting payment, and the big one: licensing. Oddly, I find that this part of the business is something that seasoned pros are the most reticent to discuss; perhaps it’s part self-protectionism, perhaps it’s the cultural omerta towards money (at least in Southeast Asia, everybody seems to judge you by how much you earn, but to ask outright would be a major social faux pas*) or perhaps it’s because some of us are afraid to admit how little we’re actually charging.

*Nobody is likely to tell you the truth anyway; culturally, it’s like asking a lady her age in the West. It’s the age-old dilemma of one’s ego wanting to show their success, but simultaneously being afraid of being a target of jealousy. Whilst boastfulness is never a desirable trait, I think we need to be proud of our work and position as professionals and craftsmen – like every other form of social posturing, others tend to judge your implied relative value on external appearances.

And here’s the dilemma (or is it a trilemma since there are three options?): if they ask, do you tell your competition – remembering that you may well be competing for the same job – what you’re billing, in order to maintain rates across the board? Do you not tell them so you win the job, but potentially at the expense of eroding rates for everybody? Or do you give them wrong information – for any one of a number of possible reasons? Let’s consider the last situation for a moment: perhaps you give a false answer because you simply don’t want anybody else to know. It could be higher or lower than the other guy – in the end it probably averages out to no harm, no foul. You could deliberately give a higher number – all other things being equal, that would win you the job at the expense of long term sustainability. Or you could lowball and hope the other guy just backs off without submitting an even lower quote, in which case you’d lose the job and affect future rates.

The problem with all of these scenarios is that none of them are win-win situations for everybody. The only situation that’s sustainable is complete transparency and meritocracy in selection – and we all know that not only does this not happen, it’s pretty much impossible to be objective when judging the relative artistic merits of photographers. Here, client opinion is law – if they don’t like your work, there’s no point in trying to argue otherwise. (In fact, there are plenty of reasons not to pursue the job – but that is another topic for another day.) As a photographer and industry member – this situation is concerning, to say the least.

Like it or not, the reality is that the professional photographic industry – perhaps to a greater extent in Asia than elsewhere – is a numbers game. Education plays a big part in this: even relatively savvy clients will choose a photographer on price as one of the primary considerations. If the difference in image quality or output is say 10%, but the price is 50%, diminishing returns never wins. This of course means two things: firstly, mediocrity thrives because it’s cheap and easy; secondly, it’s very, very difficult to perpetuate and promote a premium product and service because the incremental cost to do so far outweighs any potential returns. And in the end, if you’ve got to charge the same or close to it to get the job and the client doesn’t really appreciate the difference, then all you’re doing is running at lower operating margins than the competition. This will not be in your favor in the long run. This is also one of the reasons I decided not to switch to medium format even though there was definitely a clear jump in image quality. I’d have to spend north of US$30,000 just for a basic kit, and even then I’d still have to retain the Nikon for some things – it simply didn’t make sense in our economy.

This brings us back to the core question: pricing. You can’t charge more just because you’re using a more expensive camera, or at least it makes no sense that it’s justified; I’ve said it time and again: your equipment is in no way indicative of your skill level. And if anything, if one photographer requires less equipment to achieve the same results as another, then it should be clear that the deficit is being made up through skill. But how does this translate into money? How much better qualitatively is a $100 image vs a $1,000 one?

Ultimately, it’s down to the client, of course. But it’s important to have at least some internal scale of charges you use as a baseline to start from. Although ostensibly getting a rate quote from a photographer should be fairly simple, it’s not. Let me explain why by starting with a list of things we have to consider:

Physical shoot time required
Retouching
Travel costs, if any
Complexity of setup
Whether we have to bump or reschedule other things – you might do this for a large project, but not for a small one – this of course comes at the expense of other things and potentially written-off revenue
Permits and planning
Any additional things we might need to hire or buy – props, talent, lights, location, equipment, makeup artists
Volume
The client – both ability to pay, and how much you want to work with them
License model

In practice, the last two items are the ones that invariably provide us with the largest headaches. Let’s look at three examples, and calculate cost on a per-image basis.

Photojournalism/ reportage style assignment for a corporate client, one day of shooting. Let’s say it’s documenting a new production line process or something. Final delivery of 50 images, for internal PR and comms use only.
Commercial shoot for an ad campaign for a large international brand, five images of a couple of watches, some of which involve props. Has to be done on-location at the factory in Switzerland. Images will require heavy retouching and compositing, and be used worldwide for a period of two years across multiple media.
Whilst on job 2, another one of your existing clients calls you up and says they heard you were in Switzerland; would you mind coming over and shooting a couple of watches for them? They don’t know how many images they’ll need, but it’s two watches and you can do your usual thing of shooting first, sending over a contact sheet and they’ll pick what they need from there. You happen to have a spare day, and the necessary equipment.
A new client calls up and says they got your name from a friend, they’re opening a restaurant and need some photos of the food and interior. How much do you charge?
You get an email from a small agency who would like to use one of your images they saw on Flickr for an advertisement in Peru. There is no indication or offer of payment.

Life is suddenly not quite so simple, is it? Day rates go out of the window for #3, 4 and 5. And yes, I’ve had all five situations happen to me. In the same month. For 1., I’d go with a day rate – let’s say 100 units**. That number of images and the scope of what I have to cover sounds like about a day of work; the retouching/ postprocessing should be relatively minor since it’s documentary rather than commercial work – perhaps another day at most. I generally assume a day of shooting translates into a day of processing; this is mostly true except for the most demanding commercial work, where it’s higher. This might seem counterintuitive, but if you’re shooting fewer pictures in the first place, chances are a) you’re getting more of it right in camera, and b) those images are going to need increased amounts of individual attention. So for the most part, it’s accurate. I price retouching in with my day rates – I’ve found it easier than to split the two out; if you do, clients tend to ask ‘would it be cheaper without retouching?’ The answer of course is yes, but there is no way any halfway serious commercial photographer worth their lenscaps would even contemplate releasing unfinished images. As for licensing, in this situation the images probably have zero value to anybody but the original client, so the license model doesn’t affect pricing – I can’t make any more money off them, so whether it’s single use or worldwide unlimited exclusive makes no difference.

**I’m playing coy Asian now. Of course, how you determine what 100 units translates to in real dollar terms depends on several factors in itself: your skill level, your credentials, your client list – clout and experience, if you will – prevailing domestic conditions like cost of living etc – and how much you personally need to survive off. I figure there are two ways to do this: either make it a low number so you’re billable and busy for a relatively high portion of each month – income will be consistent, but you will be tired and not really able to grow – or assume you’re going to shoot only about 1/4 of the time or less, and extrapolate from there. The reality is that I average between four and six shooting days a month. The rest of the time is retouching, planning meetings, client pitches, producing content for the site, teaching etc. This allows for both variety and expansion: if suddenly I’m shooting 10-12 days a month, my income doubles – success means that I spend less time pitching and meeting, and more time planning and shooting because people come to me.

So, in situation 1., we have a per-image cost of 2. In situation 2, we’ve got travel costs, props, rental of stuff over on location, possibly location rental itself and permits, and in this case, either a day rate or a per shot rate. I’m guessing it’ll take two days to shoot, but given that it’s for a global ad campaign, even a raw per shot cost of 40 is on the low side. Here, I’d probably start with say 100 per shot, add incurred expenses at costs – travel – I dunno, perhaps another 200 – rentals etc – another 100. Now we’re up to 800, for a total of 160 per shot. Would the license model make a difference here? Oddly, again not directly: you can’t use the images for anything else, but what it does give you an idea of is the scope of use, and how much money they’re throwing at the overall campaign – and thus its relative importance, and the relative importance of your images. If your work is helping to sell more expensive product, why shouldn’t you get a larger portion of the proceeds? It seems like a win-win to me.

Scenario 3. is a tough one. You can’t charge travel costs because they know you’re already there and your costs are being covered by the other client – and it’s important to find out if they mind or not for the longevity of your relationship – and you can’t charge a day rate either, because you know the end images will be used commercially and require similar levels of work to the campaign images. But you’re also going to have to shoot a lot of raw material because the client hasn’t given you a shot list or have a concrete idea of what they need. In this situation, I have an idea of what these kinds of images cost – let’s say 30-50, on a relative scale compared to situation 2. – so what I’d probably do is say it’s 50 per image for x images, then if you pick more, I’ll give you a sliding scale discount down to 30 per image. You’ve already done half the work, so if for not much more incremental work you can increase your revenue, then you might as well do so. At the same time, if you’re the client, you need some incentive to buy more images – especially if they’re ones that that are ‘nice to haves’ rather than critical. I see this situation as an incremental opportunity rather than a new one – so the rates tend to be dictated by preserving the relationship and long term sustainability.

Scenario 4. happens more often than you might think. If the brief has that little information in it, chances are you’re dealing with a client that has absolutely no concept of IP, licensing or even retouching. They’ll ask you to do things like ‘photoshop in people to make the place look busy’. With jobs like this, I will usually ask for an estimated number of shots and assume unlimited use since they’ll probably be no good to anybody, and explaining any other kind of licensing model is near-impossible; if they can’t even give me that, then it’s a day rate and a guess based on what they need. If the number works, then we go ahead. If not, then I don’t touch it with a barge pole: I’ve been burned in the past. Convincing people isn’t the problem; it’s the disconnect in their expectations and yours. Never underestimate how much of a headache the inability to communicate your artistic requirements can be. Many years ago, I once had a fashion client that insisted he didn’t want the model looking at the camera; I warned him that the images would look distant because of a lack of direct viewer engagement; he insisted; and then complained afterwards when ‘the model isn’t even looking at me!’. Ugh.

The final scenario is also fairly common. I start off by informing them that I’m a commercial photographer and images are available for license; rates depend on the usage. If they come back after that, then usually we’re good to go – name a number and if it’s reasonably in line with prevailing rates, then you’ve just gotten a sale. I guess it’d be around 10-20 or perhaps more, depending on usage. If you get a reply along the lines of ‘but it’s only for xyz and it’ll be great exposure for you’, then thanks, but no thanks. Not only will nobody remember the photographer in some obscure campaign in some obscure location, but chances are your image will probably land up being used somewhere else too because they have no understanding or respect for IP. It’s one of the many reasons why I will never put full size images with any remote sort of commercial value online anywhere^. The basis is this: clearly your work has commercial value because the end user would like to employ it to help sell whatever widget or service it is; but they are not willing to reward that value, so why should I give away something for free – especially when there’s no value that returns to me?

^And given that I refuse to show unfinished work in case it’s attributed to me, this means I’ll just never post full size images period, no matter how many review commenters ask.

In these five fairly common scenarios, we’ve got per-image prices that range anywhere from 2 units to 160 units – a variance of 80x – for the same photographer, and probably the same equipment. Now, see why the question of ‘how much do you charge?’ is about as easy to answer as ‘how long is a piece of string’? Of course, if you only shoot one style – say full blown commercial campaign only, or reportage only – then your prices are likely to be a lot more consistent, but I’m sure you can also understand why there’s no way I can charge 160 units per reportage image, and 2 units per campaign image would be completely unsustainable.

To some degree, this means that rates are self-moderating; I can’t actually think of that many other photographers who both shoot reportage assignments and luxury watch campaigns. And within the categories, there are of course tiers; the more famous you are, the more you can charge. Of course, we all know that fame doesn’t necessarily correlate with ability the domestic wedding photography market is perhaps the best example of this, and also the worst example of a regulated industry. You’ve got famous society ‘pros’ who are little more than button pushers charging five figures per day; at the same time you’ve got some seriously skilled amateurs who do it as a weekend hobby for a few hundred for the entire event. There is simply no consistency here.

The same applies to teaching and workshops: if that’s all you do for a living, then you need to have consistency of income, which is brought on through volume. If you’re a bona fide working commercial photographer, then there’s always a tradeoff: the time you spend teaching is time you can’t bill a client for, and it must be committed to far in advance of the actual workshop – and you have to do it even if you have another better paid job for the same period, and less than half capacity. Here, as a student, you’re paying for the photographer’s opportunity cost and of course their knowledge and experience. Value here is relative; clearly there’s more to be learned from somebody who’s proven their images have commercial value than somebody who just blogs. Yet this doesn’t seem to be the case in the market, most of the time: as usual, the loudest voice wins. Just because he shouts loud doesn’t mean what he has to say is worth listening to. As usual: judge value by output. Be very careful of people whose images are either limited in style/ subject matter – a lack of diversity points to a fundamental lack of skills in some areas – or just downright crap.

In a roundabout way, this brings us back to our starting point. I firmly believe in a couple of things: how much you charge should be proportional to both the work required (obviously) and your level of skill. And your level of skill should be determined by both your clients, and by implication, your peers who also shoot for those clients. There’s a degree of information available that should give you a fair idea of what to quote; if not, be honest and ask what your client’s expectations are. Some will try to lowball or game you; most will be honest. The nice thing about this system is that whilst nobody really knows how much everybody else charges, they all have enough of an idea not to spoil the market. In the long run, whilst charging less will get you the job today, it means that things become tougher in the future: in every other industry, rates up with inflation and experience, not down. At the high end, a lot of this is semi-regulated by the agencies; whilst traditional ad agencies engaging photographers directly almost always take a sizeable cut of the bill presented to the client, they also handle a large number of major commissions; large enough that there’s a general benchmark for prices. Still, in recent times I’ve experienced (and heard) a lot of companies going direct to the photographer in the interest of saving some money; the photographer, not always being aware of the agency markup, will (if they’re smart) quote a lower price than the agency would, but a bit higher than their normal rates; there’s a bit of a positive shift going on at the moment.

Now what we need to do is be consistent to ensure that a) everybody wins and b) rates don’t erode further in the longer term. I don’t think the sharing of actual numbers is a bad thing, but I think we need to be a bit careful who we share with: you want to make sure that a) they’re not direct competition but still in a similar line, or b) you have tacit agreements not to poach each other’s clients unless the client makes the first move. There are a small circle of pros here who believe the same; in the longer term, the plan is to set up some sort of agency or accreditation/ regulatory body with the aim of both taking care of the long term commercial interests of the photographer, as well as educating clients and ensuring quality control. Despite what everybody thinks – it isn’t all doom and gloom in the industry, but it’s going to require a lot more collaboration than we have at present*** to make it stick. MT

Coda: Look out for a future article on understanding licensing: I originally wanted to roll it into this one, but by the time I explained the pricing model, we were already at dissertation-length and probably broaching the limits of most readers’ patience.

***In Malaysia, at least

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, billing, business, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photography, pricing, rates, thein

Why cropping is bad

January 21, 2013 By Ming Thein 74 Comments

For the longest time, I’ve been saying (perpetuating the popular adage?) that cropping is bad. I’ve touched on the reason in previous articles – notably these two on compositional building blocks, and proper perspective practice – But I don’t think I’ve really explained why. There are several reasons; I’ll go through these in some detail over the course of this article, and finish with a commentary on what really happens in the commercial industry – and why we photographers frequently want to strangle the creative directors, agency people or layout artists on the other end of the shoot.

But firstly, an example. Look at the image below: compositionally, it works, yes? What focal length was it shot with? The EXIF data says 16.8mm – oops, that’s a small sensor, so it’s probably about 100 or 150mm or something right? After all, the perspective fits.

Fear and exhilaration. RX100

Think again.

And again.

And yet again.

Oh, whoops. It seems that perhaps 16.8mm is actually somewhere closer to 40mm or thereabouts. At this size, with no other visual cues like depth of field to give away the technical properties of the image, there’s really no way to tell from the crop. This matters nothing to the viewer: each of these crops works compositionally, and doesn’t feel as though it was a compromise or chopped down from something larger. (Perhaps this is one of the hallmarks of a strong image period, I haven’t given it that much thought.) So long as them reproduction size doesn’t exceed the amount of resolution you’ve got to work with, there really is no way for the viewer of the image to know that what he or she is seeing wasn’t the original intention of the photographer.

Frequently, in the world of commercial photography, this is precisely what happens. In my earlier days, I spent a lot of time getting my compositions perfect with the intention that the images be used as-is, without cropping; of course I would leave space for copy etc. depending on the requirements of the client or the final aspect ratio. The intention was to preserve as much image quality as possible for whatever enlargements – sometimes billboard size, certainly poster size – would be required. When working with experienced clients and creative teams, this was certainly a viable approach.

Another example. Senso-ji, Tokyo.

The trouble started when working with less experienced clients who either didn’t have a creative/ PR/ advertising team, or whose team was equally inexperienced: I started getting requests to leave a lot more space around my images ‘for cropping’. I was perplexed by this: on one hand, they wanted the same style and quality of images that were in my portfolio – all of which were perfectly framed and had zero loose space whatsoever – yet they still wanted the extra room to crop. Did they not realize that these two things were at diametric odds with each other? It wasn’t the file sizes that were the issue – good-quality D800E files are usually more than enough for almost any use – it was the space around the outside. I tried to argue the point to no avail, and in the end, the client wins – I leave extra space around the border. This has the upshot of making my compositions look a bit ‘small’. But the client is happy, so I suppose that’s one good bright spot.

Senso-ji, original. Even between the crop – probably about 350mm equivalent – and the origina 90mm equivalent, there’s a lot of difference even though both are ostensibly of a telephoto perspective.

Personally, as an artist, this bothers me. It feels as though I’m ceding control of my composition to somebody else who may not have the same eye for it; almost certainly not a photographer. In fact, it’s exactly what is happening. You have no idea how the final image will be used or cropped; you can only hope it’s in a way that maintains the balance of the composition. It’s like a chef cooking the main portion of the dish, but having the waiter plate it and then running the risk of the diner complaining that the proportions of component sub-dishes are wrong, or the food is ugly. It’s now become such an ingrained habit that I’ve got to be careful with my personal work – not to be sloppy with the edges and empty space in a composition.

I realize I still haven’t explained why dead space and cropping are bad. The former is to do with compositional balance. Empty space can be used as a natural frame to isolate your subject; as a sort of visual cue to signal something anticipatory (if placed in front of your subject), or something historical (if placed behind). Or it can simply be used to show remoteness and emptiness in and of itself. The problem comes when the emptiness is not in harmony with the rest of the elements in the frame: this is what is meant by ‘balance’. A very busy center area and empty borders doesn’t work, because it feels as though the subject in the center has been artificially constrained and not allowed to use all of the space in the frame. Same case if all the action happens heavily to one side of the frame or the other. Clearly, this is not conducive to a strong composition – you’re neither using all of the available space in your frame, nor are perspectives properly employed.

A more extreme example, from my experiments with motion. Definitely a telephoto perspective, right?

It’s the latter which is the cause of the biggest problems in cropping. If you leave say a quarter of the frame width empty on all sides around a center subject, then you’re in fact cropping the frame down to a quarter of the original area, which is doubling the focal length. A 24mm becomes nearly 50mm. 35mm becomes 70mm. Wide becomes telephoto. Take a 35mm shot: the real questions is, at the time of shooting, is the shot composed as a wide, or a tele? Both call for very different arrangements of foreground, midground and background objects to create an effective composition.

And the original frame – a wide 24mm equivalent.

And here we come to the crux of the problem with cropping: it confuses perspectives. Poor use of perspective in composition is one of the major progenitors of weak images. This is generally more of a problem with wide angle than telephoto perspectives, simply because cropping a wide image can completely alter the angle of view of the shot to become a telephoto image, whereas this does not happen on cropping an image that’s already of a telephoto perspective to begin with (there is little difference in perspective between 300mm and 600mm, for instance). Wide-angle images with no clear foreground subjects result in the action being flattened into the background of the image and seeming very far away; there’s no obvious subject to come forward and attract the attention of the viewer.

At this point, if you haven’t read the earlier linked article on proper perspective practice, I highly recommend you do so now.

In order to make a strong image, you have to use both all of the available space in the frame, as well as the perspective of the lens effectively. And to do that, there has to be a degree of previsualization on the part of the photographer before taking the shot; it might be as simple as consciously putting your subject into the foreground with a wide, and looking for layers with a tele, or as precise as knowing exactly what focal length corresponds to what field of view. With practice and a degree of conscious observation, the former turns into the latter. This results in the photographer having the ability assess a scene and compose images in his or her mind’s eye before even looking through the viewfinder; combine that with a degree of anticipation, and you’ve got the skills to see strong images.

However, if your 28mm lens sometimes yields a 75 degree field of view (which is what 28mm should yield in on 35mm full frame format), sometimes it yields 50 degrees, or 42 degrees at others – how are you going to know where to position your subjects in the field of view arc to use up the full 75 degrees? The answer is, you won’t. And this results in dead or empty space in the frame, which in turn leads to compositional imbalance, which then results in a weak image. Familiarity with how to compose for a given field of view (and focal length) is therefore the key to strong images: frequent cropping makes this completely impossible.

In some ways, this is like an amateur who doesn’t understand perspectives shooting with a zoom: the lens does the framing, rather than the photographer. Sometimes you want to your subject to occupy a large proportion of the frame, but still retain context; the answer is to shoot wide and go closer, of course. Zooming in completely destroys context; cropping after the fact is the same. A competent photographer shooting with a zoom will pick their perspective first, then use their feet to frame – perhaps tweaking very slightly with the zoom to finesse things, but not by more than a few millimetres – any more, and the perspective deviates noticeably from what was intended.

The final reason not to crop has to do with reasons of image quality: why pay for 36 million (or however many) pixels, and throw away half of them? You might as well save yourself some money, processing time and storage overhead and just buy a 18 megapixel camera instead (assuming of course shot discipline is identical in both situations). Basically, you’re shortchanging yourself.

At this point, you are probably wondering if there are any situations in which cropping for composition is acceptable – other than the hack-fisted art director. This might surprise you, but I think the answer is a definite yes. Firstly: if you have an imprecise viewfinder, you might make proper use of the intended perspective, but still be left with a bit extra which you couldn’t see; trimming the edges to what you did see is fine. (Though with experience, you’ll soon learn to compensate for this.) Secondly, if you really, really, really have no choice: the rest of the frame is may be unimportant, and you have no way of getting closer, but this once-in-a-lifetime historical event is happening now in front of you. Then maybe. (But even so, I’d probably find a way of composing to use the rest of the frame as context to the main event.)

I think the only major reason for cropping is to achieve aspect ratios that are non-native to the sensor/ camera combination you’re using; but this of course goes with the intention that you will compose for these aspect ratios at the time of shooting, with the perspective considerations that are implied. Explicitly, this means that the final cropped image must always retain one original dimension from the original source file – height if cropped to a more square aspect ratio, or length if cropped to a more panoramic one. Otherwise, we’re back to throwing away perfectly good pixels again

My personal shoot philosophy is not to crop with the exception of different aspect ratios. I don’t trim for viewfinder inaccuracy, even when I shoot with rangefinders; I guess I’m trained to ensure that my subject occupies a reasonably central portion of the frame, and stands out strongly enough that the viewer isn’t distracted by any bits that might creep in around the edges. Do commercial requirements bother me? Without a doubt yes, but I do my best to manage the client so they understand why framing and shooting with the final use in mind always delivers the best results. MT

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, cropping, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, perspective, photography, thein

Choice, sufficiency and intangibles

January 18, 2013 By Ming Thein 73 Comments

Nobody needs one of these to tell the time, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want one.

The incredibly strong and polarizing responses to the Hasselblad Lunar post in the last few weeks have lead me to think a bit more about why exactly people are so riled up about it, even those who aren’t going to buy one. I’ve even had people who’ve never commented on any of my other posts before either leave comments on the site, Facebook or Flickr – or in the case of a couple of people, email me and openly question my sanity and whether I have a financial interest in Hasselblad (!)

Firstly, I have zero financial interest in any camera company. I was in private equity and M&A for many years before turning pro; I would never invest in a camera company because the business has such incredibly low margins and high risk that any potential returns are simply not worth the risk. There are other reasons, but it’s not necessary to go into them here. The only financial interest I have in any camera sales are referrals via Amazon, and that’s both constant across all camera brands, as well as completely irrelevant here simply because you cannot buy a Lunar from Amazon.

Now that I’ve cleared up my personal position, lets take a fresh look at things. Clear your mind and try to be as objective as possible for the next thousand or so words; put aside your personal biases and preconceptions for the moment. And ultimately, remember that you are always free to vote with your wallet.

Let us begin.

I’m going to start with a bit of an analogy: the auto industry. In the early days, everything was quirky and heavily manufacturer-dependent. You might not always find the accelerator and brake pedals in the same place from car to car, for instance. To drive one effectively – and end up at your destination without breaking your car or your passengers – you really had to know your machine. Today, with few exceptions, the accelerator is always on the right, the brake is always in the left, and the stick between the seats controls the direction and speed of travel.

Cars have reached a point of development where not only so they all operate the same, but they are increasingly looking the same, too. For getting from A to B, pretty much anything will do the job just fine – yes, a Bugatti Veyron can get you there faster than a VW, but to do so requires some skill to operate and seriously diminishing returns in cost terms and general usability. That said, under most driving conditions, the VW will be easier o operate and produce exactly the same outcome. (Hell, my wife’s VW Polo will happily do over twice the legal speed limit without breaking a sweat.) For most people, it’s not necessary. But that doesn’t stop you wanting one, no matter how impractical and expensive it may be. At a more achievable level, plenty of people buy BMWs or Mercedes over Hondas; they don’t fundamentally do the job any differently (ironically, I’m writing this post on my iPhone while waiting for my car to get a new battery*) but we still want one anyway.

*And here’s a good example of sufficiency – I would prefer to write this on a proper keyboard with my 27″ monitor, but I’m certain the content and message of the article wouldn’t have been any different. The same applies to using a pen and paper, etc. I can make do just fine with something less, but I would prefer to use something else – and do so, because I can.

Your car choice is as much a personality statement as it is a tool. You probably use it every day, so you want it to be comfortable, familiar, and perhaps have some of the conveniences that might matter to you – it could be a third row of seats or wheel-mounted shift paddles. A mom of three is going to have very different requirements from a professional race driver. Even within our budget and specification requirements, there are often myriad similar confusing choices; I hate car shopping because you never get to try one for long enough to decide if it works for you or not in the long run.

The moral of the story is about sufficiency. Once we have achieved sufficiency, we then have choice. Once mass penetration has been achieved, proliferation is the only way that such consumer markets can sustain themselves, especially when most buyers are only going to make one such large purchase every few years. The investment required to develop a complex consumer product is enormous; I have no doubt that a new sensor easily runs into the millions, if not tens of millions.

As much as I like quirky products as much as the next guy, there has to be some commonality or economies of scale to make these products sustainable in the long term. I don’t want say Brand X to produce the perfect camera for me only to find that they go bankrupt three years later, leaving me with no upgrade path or after sales support. I want them to be able to survive and continue evolving the design. If that means the sensor has to be one bought and shared with other brands – take the 1/1.7″ prosumer compacts for instance – then so be it. I’d rather be able to buy a Ricoh GRD IV with the same sensor as the G15, S110, XZ-2 and LX7 than be stuck with the GRD I because the company went under making its own sensor.

Such competition is not a bad thing. It forces manufacturers to improve their product and make a compelling argument for the consumer to choose it over similar alternatives. This is a buyer’s market; if there were only one or two products in this category, we would be forced to buy them if we needed the functionality – regardless of whether we liked it or not, or if the rest of the camera was an ergonomic disaster. I, for one, don’t like the the feeling of being at the mercy of the manufacturer. Why should I hand over my hard-earned money if you don’t deserve it – don’t earn it yourself – by making something that I want to buy?

Photography has always been about making pictures. It still is, but a lot of people have now confused it with equipment collecting. (Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that so long as you know you’re a collector and and don’t pretend to be a serious and competent photographer just because you own some exotic lenses and cameras.) We have now past the point of sufficiency for the vast majority of uses – getting from A to B in the automobile analogy – but the difference is most consumers don’t know that. If you lose control of a 300km/h car, you’re probably going to lose your life. If you lose control of a 50MP camera, at worst you get an enormous blurred file. This lack of consequence I suppose is the root cause of a different psychology in most consumers; you want more if you can afford it.

But like with cars, we all want choices, individuality – look how strongly people identify with their camera brands. They are an extension of your personality, your choice of camera seems to have become a semi-religious thing that must be openly defended and fought over on Internet forums. I’ve seen people who are normally sensible, rational individuals in their real world dealings become infantile zealots. It’s almost a wonder that there aren’t riots and lynchings a Photokina – you’d never see a trade show of all the world’s major and minor religions without things descending into primal chaos.

Yet this is what photography seems to have become for most people. Just as there are religious extremists who give things a bad reputation, there are also sensible moderates who are decent individuals who just get on with their lives and contribute meaningfully to society. Cars, religion, cameras. We now have a choice, and lots of them at that. You don’t have to buy one particular car because it has a lower chance of exploding than another brand; nor do you have to switch religions because one now offers you slightly faster resurrection than another.

The ability to make a free choice according to one’s personal preferences is a first world problem. Pick whatever camera that suits you – both in technical requirements and personal aesthetics/ ergonomics – and just use it. If you don’t like it anymore, get another one, but don’t think that more of something will improve your personal skill level; at best it might make you want to shoot more, which is what will up your game – not more fps or megapixels. If you like to shoot with a large DSLR, then do so, and don’t attack others who prefer compacts. One won’t give you improve composition over the other, that’s down to the driver. There will be people who don’t understand why anything more than a compact is required; others who don’t go smaller than medium format (I know both) and still others who swear that Leicas give them a certain feel. But all of them have one thing in common: they will shoot more with a camera they enjoy using. This means if somebody wants to cover their camera in gold and vajazzle it because they think it suits their personality, why not? It may not be to our personal tastes, but I’m almost certain that they’ll probably produce better images with it than an ordinary camera simply because they want to use it in the first place.

The only reason this is becoming such a hot issue in the photography world is because the proliferation of choice is now reaching a point where it’s noticeable. Not every camera has to be black – you’d probably be mortified if you suddenly found that Honda now only made cars in one color – just as you also don’t have to buy it. But there will be somebody who does, and those people will put some small contribution back into the industry which will eventually let the manufacturers produce something that might well be perfect for you. Without these products, we face a period of stagnation and lack of choice – and I think we can all agree this is something nobody wants.

I don’t have to like every product, let alone buy it – and neither do you. But I think for the industry to survive and grow, products like the Lunar are necessary – and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of them in future from other brands. I say let the manufacturers go wild, and let the market make it’s choices; I’m almost certain that they know what’s going on in the general market sentiment (or at least they should if they’re worth their salt) – but at the same time, I double Bugatti are going to make a budget hatchback for those who complain the Veyron is too expensive, and if you can’t afford a Lexus, there’s always Toyota. In the meantime, I’m going to appreciate the good problem, pick up a camera that feels good to me and get on with the business of making images. It’s the main reason why I hate making camera recommendations – I’m sure a 5DIII is capable of as good or better images than a D600, but I know I won’t be able to make them because the way the camera feels and operates is simply counterintuitive to me. I’d still be stuck trying to think about which button to press, and as a result miss a shot that a seasoned Canon shooter would have nailed. Personal preferences matter.

Ultimately, if your photo is good enough, nobody is going to care what you shot it with – but if you hadn’t brought the camera with you in the first place, or didn’t feel like shooting with it, then the image would never have happened. And that definitely does make a difference. MT

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Film diaries: thoughts, truths and realizations

January 16, 2013 By Ming Thein 89 Comments

During the course of the last few months – shooting a grand total of a roll and a half, and processing one – I’ve had a few thoughts. Admittedly, these may be premature given that I haven’t even seen what came out of roll 2 yet, but I’ve already had a number of observations along the way which I thought I’d share with you all here.

Muse at work. F2T, Delta 100, 45/2.8 P

The look is very different. I think it’s very polarizing: what you gain is highlight headroom, at the expanse of shadows (to some extent). And there’s grain everywhere, even in the highlights; but it’s non-uniform, non-digital, and varies in size enough that it adds texture rather than distraction. I find that I definitely like it when the light is directional; I don’t like it at all under harsh sun/ midday especially in the tropics, because it seems you lose most of the midtone definition. Here, digital’s linearity seems to help considerably with exposure latitude.

Digital passed film resolution a long, long time ago. Even shooting fine grain film and processing it in a reasonably clean developer – Delta 100 in DDX – the grain is still very noticeable. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to affect the ultimate resolving power of the medium, but what fine details are there are somewhat indistinct compared to what can be achieved with digital (duh, due to the digital nature of the constituent medium – i.e. uniform block pixels.) I will try PANF in colder developer next time to see if that helps. The last time I shot/ scanned seriously, I came to the conclusion that there was at most somewhere between 8 and 10 MP of equivalent resolution in a good negative or slide – I don’t think that’s changed; I’m just not seeing any more of that regardless of the lens used. In fact, if I had to compare the output, I’d say Delta 100 feels much like a D700 shot at ISO 3200+, with similar tolerance for lenses. I must have messed something up in the developing, because I don’t remember Provia 100 being this grainy. Bottom line: we’re utterly spoiled by modern digital; even the RX100 handily outresolves 35mm film – if it had better dynamic range, I’d probably use this as my copying solution instead. Whoever is still complaining about resolution out to have their head seriously examined, probably with a baseball bat.

The Vase. Hasselblad 501C, 80/2.8 CF T* on Ilford Delta 400

That said, I’m seeing a very healthy amount of detail from my Hasselblad negatives: single pixel detail is being resolved at the 20MP level (the magnification limit of my ‘scans’), and I suspect that there may be about ~40MP worth of real detail in a low-ISO 6×6 negative. This makes sense, since the area is approximately four times the area of a 35mm negative.

The Noct-Nikkor has some noticeable focus shift issues wide open. Even on film, you can see the focus plane move as you stop down (or shoot wide open). I think this lens is going to have to be partnered with the D700 for future use, or a D600 with live view and an LCD magnifier.

35mm film is very forgiving of lenses. By f5.6 and sometimes even before, all of my ~50mm lenses (45P, 2/50MP, 58 Noct) all look equally sharp and pleasing. I actually prefer the 45P’s rendition wide open because its slight field curvature I feel adds to the image in the same way the 2/28 Distagon’s does. The good lenses, remain good, of course; some of that magic still comes through – the 2.8/21 Distagon comes immediately to mind – but it’s not as obvious as on a D600 body, let alone a D800E.

Graphic inverse. F2T, Delta 100, Zeiss 21/2.8

I like the negatives more than the positives sometimes. This appears to be a consequence of the scanning process (or, specifically, the D800E imposing its own tonal response curve onto the reproduction) more than anything; still, some of the really abstract, graphic images seem to work better if tone-adjusted and kept as a negative. Perhaps there’s a creative avenue to explore here…

I work faster with film than digital – even if my camera has no meter. The inability to chimp or make iterative improvements to subsequent shots means that subconsciously, you put all of your effort into getting it right the first time and being absolutely sure before you shoot: this is both efficient, and makes you better. One, or at most two, frames, and I’m on to the next shot. This definitely wasn’t the case with my previous experiences – perhaps my skill level has improved a bit since then.

Each roll is a bit like receiving an old-fashioned letter. Both in the fact that you have to open the container to see what’s inside, but more so because you aren’t 100% sure how it’s going to turn out – you remember most of the images (I suppose that’s like anticipation when you see the sender’s address) but there’s enough variables in the developing that the tone – no pun intended – of the message might not quite turn out how you’d expect – either good or bad. I suppose there’s also the aspect of ‘will-it-or-won’t-it-arrive?’ anxiety when you’re doing your own developing, too.

Zigzag. F2T, Delta 100, 58/1.2 Noct

Individual style is much more difficult to impose without lighting or postprocessing. I suppose this seems obvious in hindsight, but I’d say that 50% (or more, if you rely on filters and HDR) of an individual’s style is imprinted during the postprocessing phase. I know that personally, it affects my tonal map and color signature; the latter is gone with B&W film, and the former is highly dependent on the film type, developing and scanning process (and subsequent conversion). I’m trying to write a conversion action that takes my raw file and turns it into something approximating the image I expected at the time of shooting; it’s not easy because there are multitudinous variables. I suppose I could process each one individually, but that would defeat the point of shooting film: I actually don’t want that much control, otherwise I might as well shoot digital – there are fewer steps to achieving an output image, and far more repeatability.

I’m not really seeing any differently with 35mm, but the shots that work are not the ones I expected. I think compositionally, nothing much has changed. But I’m even more acutely aware of the quality of ambient light now; situations in which I’d make up any deficits in the scene for with postprocessing (uneven light, overly harsh light, colour casts etc.) are pretty much no-go with film. The positive upshot is that the scenes that work are simply gorgeous in tonality. I suppose this does actually affect the way you compose, since shadows always define the shape of an object.

It’s different for medium format, though: 6×6 really has a neat zen balance about it that I’m rather enjoying.

For film, bigger is definitely better. Or harder/ faster/ stronger/ whatever adjective you prefer. And if you’re going to be shooting it in old, manual, quirky cameras without meters anyway, it’s never, ever, going to be convenient – so you might as well go large. Different story with digital, of course.

I keep forgetting to remove the damn dark slide. Enough said. One of these days, I’m sure I’m going to bend or lose it when I’m in a hurry.

Developing is both simple and hard. There aren’t that many steps to it – mix chemicals, open cannister, load reel, put inside tank, seal tank; add developer and time; rinse; add fixer and time; rinse. Hang to dry. Scan, or print to taste. The trouble is, many of the critical steps are both impossible to repeat exactly one time to the next, and there are several of them. And batches of film aren’t always consistent. I’m sure there’s an art to all of these things, but that’s something much like digital processing: you can only get a feel for it through experience. Perhaps once I’ve developed enough rolls I might get some of the touch too; and maybe then I’ll write about it (i.e. when I have something worthwhile to say). Also, 120 film is considerably more difficult to load on the reels than 135; I suspect it’s because the film is both wider and seemingly slightly thinner, too.

To say a particular film has a ‘signature’ seems to be as much a fallacy as saying a particular sensor has one. The development process affects the outcome to such a large extent that I don’t think it’s possible to separate it from the outcome – i.e. it’s really not all down to the film. I certainly don’t have the experience yet, but I’m pretty sure I could make most B&W films turn out the way I expect once I have some handle on their native tonal characteristics and that of the chemistry – much like the various raw files from different cameras.

I need to figure out this drying business. By sheer dumb luck, my first roll turned out okay; the problem was drying it. I rather unwisely decided to hasten the process by wiping the film with a microfiber cloth – it worked fine for the first few frames, then really buggered up the ones at the end with streaks and scratches (presumably from something that got stuck in the cloth). Moral of the story: go buy some hydroflow agent, hang and have patience. Or maybe a rubber squeegee thingy.

Dust spotting isn’t as bad as I remember it to be. It seems that my early slides picked up a considerable amount more dust than these B&W negs – no idea why. But what used to be easily 10+ minutes of spot removal is perhaps 30s on a bad image – a very fragile-emulsion negative such as PAN-F, for instance; and one or two strokes on a clean one. Incidentally, it’s the same technique that I use for retouching dust on watches.

Highlight roll-offs are gorgeous. I suspect this is because most of the dynamic range is in the highlights – something to do with reciprocity error or perhaps the underlying photochemistry of the medium. There’s always a bit of gradation left in even the brightest zones, and nothing ever seems to truly overexpose (unless you do so by more than three or four stops).

That said, there’s not as much dynamic range as I expected. Perhaps this is not entirely accurate. The dynamic range is there, it’s just not distributed as I expected; I’m used to the extreme linearity of the D800E and its brethren, which let you basically expose to the right and be almost sure that all of the shadow information will be there. With film it appears the cost of the wonderful highlight tonality are very compressed shadows. Personally, this means to get the tonal style I’mm after, I’ll have to expose my primary subject highlights in zone 7-8 and let the rest fall where it may, but specifically look for scenes which work with heavy shadows.

How much of the tonal qualities of them D800E are being imposed on my ‘scans’? Unfortunately, without printing, there’s no real way to know – any digital conversion is going to result in some…reinterpretation, I suppose, of the original tonal values.

I doubt I can get anywhere near the same color accuracy with film. Although color films have some latitude to their working ambient light Kelvin temperatures, there’s simply no way you can have film that works at 5500K for one shot, and 4375K for the next – but you can with digital. For this reason, I’m just not going to bother with color film – for now.

Inverse (this is the negative). Hasselblad 501C, 80/2.8 CF T* on Ilford Delta 400

Ah, grain. I’ve always been of the opinion that there’s nothing wrong with it, so long as your image is in focus and your idea is clear; film has just made me recalibrate my expectations. Hell, ISO 1600 from the OM-D looks better at equivalent magnifications than ISO 100 35mm film…

So far, it’s been an interesting experiment – both creatively and in an attempt to better understand some of the technical and artistic history behind photography and why some particular images look the way they look. For instance, I now understand why most film street photography is both grainy and very high contrast; similarly, I’ve developed a new appreciation for Salgado’s developer and printer – I would still love to see his negatives though, to figure out how much of his look is down to light at the scene, how much is down to developing voodoo, and how much of it is down to skillful printing. In the meantime though, I think so long as I’m shooting with a serious focus on creative development, film is probably here to stay for me. Time to pick up more 120 for the ‘Blad; I have a feeling I won’t be doing much 35mm film shooting because it isn’t quite the creative break I wanted. 6×6, on the other hand, is absolutely magnificent. MT

____________

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Filed Under: Articles, Film Diaries, On Photography Tagged With: article, creativity, essay, experiment, film, film diaries, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photography, thein

Understanding metering, part two: what to use, when

January 4, 2013 By Ming Thein 41 Comments

In part one we examined why metering is important, and how the basics of how meters work. In today’s article, I’ll take a closer look at the different types of metering, how they differ, and under what situations they should be deployed.

A sample viewfinder – in this case, a rough representation of the Nikon D2H/ D2X finder.

With that background out of the way, let’s look at how the various metering options work, and what typical situations they might best be deployed under. Cameras typically have three options, or some variation upon that. Within these options, it’s also usually possible to fine tune various aspects of the meter’s operation. I’m going to leave out handheld meter operation since this is something that’s almost never encountered today. An important point to note is that all meters can be fooled by situations of uniform luminance, so don’t trust the readout blindly. Remember, meters function by averaging the entire evaluated area out to middle gray; this means if your evaluated area is meant to be black or white, you’re going to need to add or subtract some exposure compensation. For predominantly light/ white scenes, you need to add; for dark scenes, subtract. This holds true for every one of the different metering methods detailed below.

Average
The simplest form of metering evaluates the frame as a whole, and tries to expose it to middle gray – under the assumption that there will be shadows and highlights, but these will average out. Seldom used today because you will almost always require exposure compensation (making it unsuitable for the point and shoot crowd which constitutes most of the global camera market), but has the one enormous advantage of behaving predictably under every situation.

Spot
The simplest form of meter is the spot meter. This evaluates luminosity at the desired point only, ignoring everything else in the frame. There are two important things to be aware of with a spot meter: the location and size of the spot. The metering spot’s location is either in the center of the frame, or tied to the selected or active autofocus point; the logic there is that you would typically want to ensure your subject is both in focus and properly exposed. Variations on the spot meter include types that are biased for highlights or shadows – i.e. you meter a shadow or highlight and it doesn’t turn out over or underexposed. Don’t forget to add appropriate exposure compensation.

The size of the spot is also very important – don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s a tiny, precise eyedropper the same size as your autofocus area box – it isn’t! Most consumer cameras have a spot size that’s about 2.5% of the frame area, which is actually quite large – imagine your frame divided into six vertically and horizontally, i.e. a grid of 36 boxes; a 2.5% spot meter is the size of one of these boxes. Professional cameras might have a 1% spot meter; imagine a 10×10 grid of 100 boxes, and this is pretty much what you’ve got. In our sample viewfinder above, the cyan box is a 1% spot meter, tied to the active (red) AF point. Keep this in mind as you’re moving it around. If your spot meter is tied to the center of the frame, then you’ll need to assign another button – perhaps the shutter half press – to lock exposure once you’ve metered for your subject (unless it is of course dead center, which is highly unlikely).

The obvious question would be why spot meters aren’t smaller – firstly, you don’t actually want them to be that acute, otherwise moving the camera by a fraction of a degree might yield a vastly different (and incorrect) exposure – they’d be too sensitive to use. Secondly, some averaging is still a good thing – you can move the camera around a bit until the spot falls onto the right mix of light/ dark to give the desired exposure. With practice, this can be much quicker than using exposure compensation.

Use the spot meter in situations where your subject is in very different light to the rest of the frame – either much brighter or much darker – in order to ensure that the focus of your shot is properly exposed. It’s great for high key or low key images – put your subject in the shadows or highlights respectively, and spot meter there – or even general situations under which the luminance of your composition doesn’t vary that much. I don’t generally use it for street photography or fast moving situations, because it requires precision and/ or a little meter-and-recompose dance that can cost you valuable time.

One tip: the way I use the spot meter is always either covering my subject, if the subject is darker than the rest of the frame; or, on the highlights plus a bit of dark area if your subject is lighter than the frame. This effectively tricks the meter into adding a bit of exposure compensation to average out the bright/ dark areas – you need to do this to prevent your highlights from falling into middle gray and consequently completely losing your shadow information. It also adds a bit of speed in operation since you don’t have to muck around with exposure compensation.

Spot meters only came about when the metering cells in cameras could be made small enough to evaluate only a portion of the frame; they’re common now because our metering sensors are made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of discrete individual elements.

Centerweight
In our sample viewfinder, the circle around the center AF point represents the centerweight meter area border. That sounds like a bit of complex mouthful, but in reality it’s not. A centerweighted meter divides the frame into two areas – the circle in the middle, and the border. The circle in the middle is presumably roughly where most subjects are going to be framed, which in turn you would like to expose properly etc – it is metered separately from the border area. The two metering values are combined in a predetermined ratio – usually 70-30 in favor of the central portion, sometimes 60-40 – to determine the final exposure value.

Centerweighted meters are the predecessor to matrix metering – they try to average things out over the entire scene, and make a sensible assumption or two about what you would like to expose for. Modern cameras allow you to change the size of the center area – the D800E, for instance, allows a spot anything between 8mm and 20mm in diameter. The default center area is usually etched onto the focusing screen for reference. Note that centerweighted metering was the successor to evaluative metering, and shares its advantage of predictability: if you put your subject in the circle, chances are the exposure will be right; the advantage it has over evaluative metering is the ability to bias the exposure towards your subject.

In situations where spot metering would not be suitable – action, for instance – I actually prefer using centerweighted metering to matrix in unfamilar cameras; at least I have some idea of how the meter will respond. There’s nothing more frustrating than missing a shot to over or underexposure because matrix metering has gotten things very, very wrong.

Matrix
Matrix metering is either a miracle or a curse, depending on where you stand. For those who don’t want to take control of their cameras, matrix metering provides a higher ‘hit rate’ than evaluative or centerweight; the problem is, you have absolutely no idea when it’s going to get it wrong, and how much by. This can be rectified with experience with a certain system; as you encounter more situations, you get a better idea of when the camera is going to miss. It’s for this reason that the only time I use matrix metering in a situation where delivery is critical is when I’m shooting cameras I’m familiar with – the Nikons, and the OM-D. Everything else is either spot or centerweight.

That doesn’t of course explain how it works. The frame is divided up into a number of areas – up to 100,000 of them in the Canon 1Dx – and a reading taken of each area, for both luminance and color. The camera then either compares this to a database of similar situations (i.e. photographs converted into 100,000 or however-many pixel maps, along with exposure values) and then determines the exposure. If the camera can’t find a matching situation, then it makes an intelligent guess about what the exposure should be based on a combination of overall scene luminance, color, and the current AF point. With this many variables, it’s actually surprising that the meters get it right such a high percentage of the time – perhaps there are only so many possible luminance maps?

In any case, matrix metering tends to be more reliable in situations that don’t have extreme contrasts, or bright point sources in the frame, or very small subjects. Under quickly-changing circumstances, it’s the method of choice – it might get things wrong, but most of the time it will save you from having to move around the spot or use exposure compensation. For most users, matrix metering is sufficient, and you can always add or subtract exposure compensation and take another shot. It’s also worth noting that matrix meters that use the imaging sensor are much more accurate and reliable than those that have separate metering sensors simply because the tonal response characteristics of both match, making overexposure almost impossible. Presumably, these should also run some form of ‘expose to the right’ algorithm for digital cameras, but then again perhaps not as it would only be useful for RAW shooters.

I think considering some examples would be useful at this point. Let’s take a few of the images from my recent Introduction to Wildlife workshop:

This image could be taken care of by either spot or centerweight; I have no idea if matrix would have been accurate or not. For centerweight, you would need to ensure the central spot is over the subject area, like so:

This implies a lock-exposure-and-recompose is necessary – or, perhaps not seeing as I intended to crop the final image to a more square aspect ratio anyway. You might wonder whether the 70-30 distribution – specifically the metered portion falling on the black water – would throw things out; in this case, actually it helped. The center portion would have metered the white bird to middle gray, i.e. too dark; the outer portion metered the black water to middle gray, i.e. too light. They averaged out.

We could also have used the spot meter, in a few different ways. For location A, no compensation would be required so long as we took a bit of the dark portion and a bit of the highlight portion – i.e. enough to average out to middle gray. Location B would have required some positive exposure compensation as it is a highlight, in zone VII-VIII or so. Location C falls in zone V anyway, which is middle gray – so no exposure compensation would haven been required. In this case, I would have picked location C if using an AF lens (I wasn’t) as it’s of both the right luminance value and subject distance – alternatively, the head would have been a good choice, too.

Here’s our second example. This is a much trickier situation because of the thin rim of backlight around the bird; you don’t want to overexpose that else you’ll lose all tonal detail in the feathers.

You can see here that centerweighted metering wouldn’t work; the highlight areas – in this case, the subject from the meter’s point of view – is just too small. It would expose for the dark area and result in blown highlights. Spot metering, on the other hand, is ideal:

Location A is obviously nonsensical because although it might be the same luminance value as most of the bird, that isn’t the part we’re exposing for; using location A would result in huge overexposure. Location B is fine, and the highlight area is small enough that it wouldn’t require any exposure compensation since some of the dark background is also included – this is actually what I used – C and D are also workable options, though C might require a little negative compensation.

How about a few more examples?

Clearly, spot metering on the eye is the only way to go – all other options would have resulted in overexposure and both detail loss and an imbalance in the composition caused by the eye of the viewer not going to the intended area.

Actually, any metering option would work fine here – the scene is divided into relatively large portions of different luminance. If you used spot on the feathers, you’d have to add a bit of exposure compensation to keep things white; if you used center, you’d have to lock exposure and then recompose.

Our frame is fairly consistent in luminance, so once again, any metering method would work. However, all would require a bit of positive exposure compensation as the overall tone of the subject is light, and should be kept high-key.

Small white subject against a dark background, intense contrasts – spot meter.

Here’s one situation where matrix metering would actually work better than the other options: you have relatively even luminance across the frame, a strong colored background (making centerweight possibly inaccurate) and a fast moving subject (making spot metering impractical).

Of course, knowing which metering method to use in a given situation is quite useless unless you have things set up so that it’s easy to switch between them; otherwise, pick one and get used to the way it operates. If you can lock exposure separately from focus, then you don’t really need to use exposure compensation most of the time – the spot meter is all you need. If you can’t be bothered to do the finger dance, well, that’s why matrix was invented. Needless to say: as ever, practice is the key to mastery. MT

____________

Visit our Teaching Store to up your photographic game – including Photoshop Workflow DVDs and customized Email School of Photography; or go mobile with the Photography Compendium for iPad. You can also get your gear from B&H and Amazon. Prices are the same as normal, however a small portion of your purchase value is referred back to me. Thanks!

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, how to, metering, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photography, thein, understanding

Understanding metering, part one: introduction

January 2, 2013 By Ming Thein 49 Comments

An image from my recent Introduction to Wildlife workshop, and a very tricky metering situation – more importantly, do you know why, and what to do in a situation like this to achieve the desired exposure outcome?

One of the more important – yet almost always overlooked – aspects of camera operation is metering. Simply put, the meter determines what your final exposure is, and how bright or dark your image looks relative to the scene. Unless you are shooting manual – and even then – the camera’s exposure is determined by the meter. Add the fact that the eyes of a viewer tend to go to the brightest and/ or highest contrast portions of an image first (i.e. this should be your subject) – and it’s clear to see why it’s absolutely critical to understand both how metering works as a fundamental concept and any camera-specific peccadilloes that might exist. The last thing you want is to find that your camera drastically underexposed a once-in-a-lifetime shot of some critically important event because you didn’t know (or forgot) that the meter was extremely affected by point light sources*.

*This can actually happen. The meter in the Leica M8/9 is extremely sensitive to direct point light sources, and can often yield nonsensical readings of say 1/1000s ISO 160 for a shooting aperture of f4 at night – that’s because it’s picking up a street lamp. One can only hope the new M is less affected by this – the only solution to the problem I’ve been able to find is just go 100% manual at night.

How meters work
Depending on which exposure mode your camera is in, the meter will try to find a combination of settings that creates an image that averages out to middle gray in luminance, i.e. the histogram average is around level 127 or thereabouts. There are three exposure parameters the camera can use to control the amount of light reaching the image processor – note that the sensor is also now involved in the process – shutter speed, aperture and digital gain, i.e. ISO. If you fix any one of these variables manually – say by shooting aperture priority at a set ISO – then the camera varies the remaining parameters according to a set of rules in order to achieve the ‘correct’ exposure. If the correct exposure is out of adjustment range – e.g. the required shutter speed for a given aperture is too high – then you’re going to land up with an over or underexposed image.

In program mode, the camera controls both aperture and shutter values depending on its preset program; the photographer can usually shift the program to a different combination of values which still yield the same net amount of light hitting the sensor. In shutter priority, the user fixes the shutter value manually, so the camera alters the aperture. In aperture priority, it’s the other way around. In manual mode, the user fixes both values – the only thing the meter can do is display how far off the manually chosen exposure is from the correct exposure, or alter the ISO or flash. If auto-ISO is activated, then the camera will always default to the lowest possible ISO within the specified range in order to keep the shutter speed at or above a certain value – either user selected or 1/ focal length in second. (Note that for some cameras, using manual shutter and aperture values will cause the camera to shift the ISO rather than display the variance from correct exposure.)

Simple enough, right? So why are there so many different metering methods? My OM-D, for instance, has no less than five: matrix, centerweight, spot, spot low and spot high. The differences are down to the area of the frame the meter evaluates when deciding what the correct exposure should be. Note that in all situations, it will still try to expose the considered portion of the frame to middle gray – except this area might change. One uses the different metering methods in different subject situations. We’ll get into that in more detail later; first, there are a few more things that need explaining by way of background.

The meter itself is a photovoltaic cell, or combination of cells, whose output voltage over a certain area varies depending on how much light lands on it. The more light, the higher the voltage, which is translated into a brighter exposure. A particular chemistry’s electrical response is a fixed property of the material, and therefore consistent across different situations and cameras. Note that some meters require power to give a readout – this is because a base voltage must be applied across a semiconductor for it to respond to light, or to amplify the signal to a point where it gives an output that can be displayed – CCD meters are like this, for instance – other types of semiconductor photovoltaics do not require power because they already produce current on their own the minute light hits them. (Solar cells, for instance, fall into the latter category.)

Note that not all cameras have built-in meters; very early film cameras generally did not, and required the use of a separate handheld meter, or a particularly sensitive eyeball. My Nikon F2 Titan, for instance, comes standard with the unmetered/ plain DE-1 prism/ finder. Early Leicas are the same. A whole variety of hotshoe-based clip on meters are available, as well as handheld types. Modern digital cameras either use a separate metering CCD, usually located in the viewfinder (for an SLR) or use the imaging sensor (for any live-view based cameras) – this is obviously the most accurate possible method of metering given that the metering sensor also perfectly represents the response of the imaging sensor. (This was not always the case with film and separate meters; it was therefore highly important to know the characteristics of your particular chosen film.)

Incident vs reflective
All cameras’ built-in meters are of the reflective type. This is to say that they measure the amount of light reflected from the subject and hitting the camera; the advantage is that you don’t have to stand in the same light as your subject in order to obtain a reading – potentially problematic if your subject is say, a landscape that’s several kilometers away – but at the same time, they suffer from the disadvantage of not being able to obtain an accurate reading for very reflective subjects. Incident meters are always handheld (but handheld meters can be either incident or reflective) and are placed in the same light as the subject in order to obtain an accurate exposure reading. The photosensitive portion of the meter is covered by a matte white dome in order to ‘average out’ the light measured by the meter.

Exposure compensation
The use of exposure compensation is simply translated into an offset of the zero point of the meter. For instance, if you dial in +1 EV exposure compensation, then the meter will add this to the calculated exposure value before displaying the final settings.

Flash metering
Flash meters a slightly more complicated. There are two ways to determine how much flash power is required to achieve the correct exposure. The first is by using an incident light meter next to the subject, firing the flash, and setting the camera with the valued displayed on the meter. This is the most precise method, but again, is often impractical if you do not have time to repeat a shot. The second, more common method, uses a very short duration and low-power preflash of known output in conjunction with the reflective meter to determine how much additional power is required to make up the gap between the trial exposure and a correct exposure, with the given camera settings. The adjustment to flash power is made almost instantaneously and a second, correct power flash is fired along with the exposure. This entire process is so fast that there is almost zero added lag. The disadvantage again is that partially transparent or reflective objects may not be correctly exposed as the metering type is reflective-only.

Histograms and expose to the right
The exposure histogram represents the evolution of the light meter into the digital age. It not only shows you what the average exposure should be over the entire frame, but how that exposure is distributed. For instance, it is important to know whether you have one uniformly gray area across the entire frame, or say two halves of the frame divided into 100% black and 100% white areas. A simple exposure meter that evaluates the entire frame would give identical readings for both situations. However, in the second situation, you would probably expose for the highlight areas to prevent loss of tonal detail. This would actually result in a final exposure that is slightly darker then what the whole-frame evaluative meter would suggest. Learning to read a histogram, is therefore a very useful tool for digital photography. Histograms and digital actually come with two others very useful tools. The first is the ability to display areas of the image that are overexposed – usually in the form of a flashing highlights warning; the second, is the ability to redraw the histogram based on the specific area of the image displayed. Note that availability of both of these functions depends very much on the camera you’re using. Some cameras are able to display histograms and overexposure warnings for individual color channels, as well as overall luminance.

Metering is actually much more critical in the digital age, simply because of the tonal response characteristics of the imaging medium. With film, there was a degree of nonlinearity and reciprocity era which translated into a little bit of latitude in photosensitivity; for negative film, this may vary by as much as 1 to 2 stops: the same exposure with different batches of film, even if the same emulsion type, may not necessarily result in the same final luminance. Add variation in the developing chemistry to that mix, and you can see why having high precision wasn’t all that critical. (Slide film is a different story; it’s very sensitive to over or underexposure.) However, digital photography is nothing if not repeatably consistent. Two identical cameras with identical exposure settings will yield an identical image under any fixed given situation. Changing the exposure by as little as a sixth of a stop will be consistently visible.

There’s also one additional characteristic of the digital medium that we need to take into consideration. This is to do with signal amplification and noise, and also the origins of the ‘expose to the right’ motto. Exposed to the right refers to ensuring that the histogram graph touches the right-hand (highlight) side of the scale, but does not exceed it. The reason for this is to capture as much total information as possible, with as little noise as possible. Underexposure in a digital image may be corrected for by increasing brightness. This is achieved by amplifying the signal; doing so also amplifies any uncertainty in the signal, which translates into increased amounts of digital noise – obviously not a desirable characteristic in an image. The advantage of exposed to the right is that we maximize the amount of single and minimize the amount of noise. The brightest tonal values in a digital image also contain the most information simply because of the way digital sensors respond to light. This translates into maximizing latitude for post processing, higher color accuracy, and less noise – in short, making the most of your image quality potential.

We therefore want to expose the image as brightly as possible, and then adjust the tonal map later in post processing – or do we? The reality is that in most situations this holds true. However, due to the nature of the total response of some sensors, there may be situations under which we do actually want to underexposed overexpose slightly in order to create a particular look due to the nonlinearity of tonal response. Of course, if you are a JPEG shooter and do not post process at all, you should expose at your intended final output level.

Note that this is much more of an issue for digital cameras than film ones, as the tonal response of film is non-linear – however, underexposure in a digital camera will usually result in undesirable noise when the luminance value is brought up to the desired level because it can only be done by amplifying a small signal. This in turn amplifies the uncertainty in the signal, i.e. noise.

White balance
One additional complication brought upon the digital photographer has to do with white balance and color temperature. Different colors have different luminosity values even under identical illumination; this is to do with the wavelengths that are reflected or transmitted to the imaging device, and their associated energy (luminance) levels. From a perceptual point of view, we see this as different brightness**. White balance is an important setting that comes into play here: it acts as the zero-offset point for color, effectively adding or subtracting different amounts of exposure compensation from the various channels to compensate for the ambient light. (This is how whites can still be rendered as white under extremely warm incandescent light if the correct white balance is used.)

**Nikon’s color matrix metering system has long compensated for this by using a metering CCD that had a color filter array over the top, both to aid scene recognition as well as increase exposure accuracy when presented with strongly colored subjects – for instance, yellow objects always render brighter than reds or purples of a given reflectance even if they’re illuminated under identical light – the color matrix meter compensates for this by increasing or decreasing the exposure if a scene is predominantly of one color or another.

We have several considerations here. The first and most obvious is of color accuracy – even so, this can be compensated for with the eyedropper tool in Photoshop providing we can find something white in the frame to set as a baseline. The less obvious problem is to do with individual channels. If the white balance is incorrect and a channel is overexposed, there is no way to recover this information afterwards. It is therefore important to set a white balance that is in the right ballpark – it doesn’t have to be perfect – to avoid this. Similarly, extreme underexposure of a channel will result in a lot of noise when compensated for afterwards. Generally, the auto white balance function in most cameras will get you in the right ballpark, but you will need to make adjustments afterwards.

The auto white balance function actually works in a similar way to an exposure meter – except instead of trying to average the scene out to middle gray in luminance, it tries to average out the scene to a perfectly neutral color.

The confluence of exposure metering and autofocus
As if the whole metering thing wasn’t complicated enough, DSLR manufacturers have started to use the metering CCDs to aid autofocus – after all, it’s an additional source of information that can be used to help track subjects especially when the mirror is down, and the main imaging sensor is not available. The flow of information is two way and affects both autofocus and metering. The autofocus system uses the spatial and color information from the metering sensor to track subjects by color and location across the frame, especially if they move out of coverage of the autofocus sensor array – the metering sensor always covers the entire frame. The exposure meter uses the autofocus information to determine which area in the frame is being focused on, and is presumably the subject, which the photographer presumably wants to have correctly exposed – in matrix metering mode, exposure is thus biased towards whatever subject is underneath the active autofocus point, or points.

I’m sure you can see there are a lot of presumptions involved. This of course means that the camera doesn’t always get either exposure or focus right when left to its own devices; the metering sensor may lack the resolution to distinguish between the desired subject and another similar-looking one, resulting in focusing errors; or the meter may be too heavily biased towards the area under the active focus area and thus yield erroneous exposures. A situation in which this might happen is say if your subject is much larger than the active focus area, and of a different luminance value. Anything small and reflective almost always causes problems, too.

The bottom line is that it pays to take control of both your meter and focusing system: without this, you can never be fully certain of what your camera is doing; I seldom use auto-anything especially with DSLRs since they do not meter off the imaging sensor (unless in live view, of course).

To be continued in part two! MT

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Photographic resolutions for the new year

December 31, 2012 By Ming Thein 65 Comments

Cheers! D700, 85/1.4G

Firstly, it’s been one hell of a year. I don’t think I’ve ever written and thought so much over such a sustained period of time; in producing content for the site and its readers, I’ve been forced to thoroughly think through all aspects of my photography and workflow. In fact, I’ve written so much that the keys on my primary computer have gone from brand-new-Apple-matte to mirror-polished-in-the-middle in that nine months. (I’m now on my way towards wearing out a new keyboard.) Thank you all for the support and the encouragement.

I’m assuming that those of you who are still here are the kind of photographer who cares about the kind of images they produce more than the equipment – or at least just as much as the equipment. Whilst I write a lot about gear – a good tradesman needs to be familiar with his tools, after all – I never forget that ultimately, it’s all about the images. I would love to find a set of equipment that works for me which I will never have to replace; give me two of those bodies and I’m all set. But, as we also all know, there is no such thing. So gear reviews will continue.

But, if you care about your images, then you surely care about the process of improvement and getting to the outcome you want; this necessarily means that it can also sometimes be a bit painful. We have to force ourselves out of our respective comfort zones in order to progress artistically. Even subjects, styles or locations that on the face of it might not have anything to do with our preferred material might well prove to impart a valuable lesson or two which we can use alter on. I’m all for cross-pollination of ideas; I know for a fact that my wildlife stalking certainly improved my street photography, and attempting to replicate the various lighting styles in paintings have helped both my commercial work and my personal work.

With that, I’d like to share my own personal photographic resolutions for the new year.

1. Shoot less.
Quality, not quantity*. And if you can have both, then tip the balance even further in favor of the quality mark. I’m shooting a lot – more than I’ve ever done – and the upshot is that I don’t always have the time to process all of that. Yet I realize that experimentation is very much part of the creative evolution process; for the two days I had on my own during the last Tokyo workshop, I shot over five thousand frames, 800 of which I kept to review in detail later on a computer, and about 200 which made the final cut. That’s still too many, in my mind: what if I could capture the essence of a place in say, 100, or even 50 truly outstanding images? I have to be even more ruthless with my seeing and editing process; conditioning yourself to throw out the crap is the only way to keep improving.

*This applies to my personal work. Commercial work is a slightly different matter; you simply can’t negotiate down a shot list – nor would you want to – if you’re being paid per-shot or billing an hourly rate.

2. Use what you’ve got.
We’re all guilty of buying something with a flimsy ‘rational’ justification when in reality it’s because we just want it; it’s about gratification rather than necessity. I think that has to stop; we need to recognize real necessity – if a job calls for 300mm, then you have to get a 300mm lens – as opposed to ‘I’ve always wanted a big lens therefore I’m going to get a 300/2.8.’ I’m sure there are pieces of equipment in my stores that are severely underused – the 45/2.8P for example – I should either pare down what I’m not using, or use it. I’m one of those strange people who feels guilty for having something sitting there, underutilized.

3. Try a new format.
If you shoot large, go small. If you shoot small, go larger. And that doesn’t mean going from a compact to medium format digital; you can try MF film for not that much money, and lose very little (if anything) if you procure all of your gear second hand. Different formats have different properties in the way of depth of field and sometimes also tonal rendition (to do with sensor/ film characteristics etc.); consequently, they can also help you to see and compose differently – which adds to the mental list of options for a particular scene. Alternatively, try shooting with a different aspect ratio – perhaps square or 16:9 – which will also help to find frames where you might perhaps have seen a photographic desert, or create something non-cliched in a popular spot.

4. Reverse your lighting.
Shoot with flash where you normally wouldn’t, and vice versa. Yes, the look will be odd and different at first, but it will help to improve one’s familiarity with light – both recognizing it, and creating it. I find that using lights makes me focus more on the composition because it imposes a higher level of discipline over your shot; you’re setting up and taking time which means that all of the elements are within your control. Similarly, shooting with available light forces you to have a higher awareness of the quality of ambient light, and the way it renders on your sensor/ film – it can really help you to previsualize compositions.

5. Travel more.
My wife always says I’m guilty of not taking enough time out to see the world – she’s right. Part of the reason why is that a consulting career completely killed the joy of travel for me; in one particularly memorable year, I’d flown 120 sectors. But travel for work and travel for personal exploration and education are completely different, and it’s taken me a while to realize that – all airports and airplanes look the same in the end. But perhaps instead of spending money on gear, I should spend money on finding new subjects. After all, there’s nothing better than a completely fresh subject to train one’s seeing and observation skills.

6. Share your knowledge.
I of course plan to continue this site in the forseeable future; I’ll certainly have to find more things to write about, but so far that doesn’t seem to have been a problem. One thing I do realize is that I rarely post on-assignment articles anymore; part of the reason is that I don’t have time on site, and part of the reason is that I’m so focused on the job at hand that I simply forget to shoot B-roll. I really need to hire an assistant.

7. Experiment with video.
One of the questions I’m frequently asked has to do with the video capabilities of the various cameras I test; to be honest, I’ve been a bit frightened of video production up to this point – I don’t really see things in sequences, and the whole production part scares me. What I’d really like to find is software that lets me edit video the same way I edit images – bulk color/ tone curve corrections etc – but I’m not sure I want to spend thousands on something I might not even use that often. I am advising on a number of small productions next year, however, so I’ll have an opportunity to have an in-depth chat with the production people – and hopefully shoot some interesting B-roll (or at the very least, stills) for the website.

8. Develop my own film.
I actually learned to do this many years ago at university, in the pre-digital days. My dissertation involved investigating the use of shorter wavelength lasers for increasing measurement precision using holography – we’re talking down to nanometers here – and of course the holograms had to be produced on film; if I remember correctly, it was Ilford PAN-F and some glass plates. (I still have those somewhere, but have no idea where exactly.) The process was slow and laborious – one exposure, three hours of developing time in a completely dark room – no safe light – and then repeat if you got the exposure wrong. Months and months of it. I think I bought my first music player around then. Now that I’m shooting with the F2T again, I want to regain control of that portion of the process – it’s not so much about throughput and efficiency as it is about furthering my understanding. We’ll see. I’ve got to somehow convince the wife that turning the spare bathroom into a darkroom is a good idea.

9. Conquer 35 and/or 50mm.
For some odd reason, I’ve always had a strong aversion to both focal lengths; 35mm more so than 50mm. They both just seem unintuitive to me – I don’t natively ‘see’ in either. I even sold a particularly excellent copy of the superlative Leica 35/1.4 ASPH FLE because I simply couldn’t get used to the focal length. 50mm I make do with on a rangefinder because it’s the longest practical focal length – the 75s and 90s tend to be a bit hit and miss with focusing due to the relative size of the frame and RF patch – but it’s not my favorite. 35 always seemed a bit tight to me, or not quite long enough – compositional no-man’s-land. The funny thing is that I have 40, 45, 50, 58 and 60mm lenses – yet I only use them for commercial work when required, and not for my own personal shooting. I suppose I should do the requisite shoot-for-a-month thing with one of them.

10. Streamline my workflow even more.
You can never be too efficient – the more throughput I can manage, the more work I can take on, or the more time I have to spend on other things – either site-related, or family related. The problem is the workload per image has increased because of file sizes; even if the compute/ conversion time is faster, the retouching time doesn’t speed up simply because I can only physically work so fast. But perhaps if I could improve the throughput for the files that don’t need retouching, I might find some time that way; I might well investigate Lightroom…

That’s it for me – you’re welcome to try any or all of them if you feel they might give you the creative kick you’ve been looking for. If you have any of your own, please feel free to share them with the other readers in the comments below – I’m sure we can all benefit from some ideas! In the meantime, enjoy the festivities and here’s wishing all of you a happy, creative, fulfilling and prosperous year ahead. MT

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Still life experiments

December 29, 2012 By Ming Thein 20 Comments

Legs

If you think about it, there’s actually not a huge leap between product photography and still life; after all, they are pretty much the same thing technically. The only tangible differences I can see are of course the intention/ message: one is to sell a product, the other is a visually interesting use of light and texture; and product photography tends to be with controlled lighting, whereas the majority of still lifes I’ve seen tend to use found available light. (Come to think of it, there’s not that much difference between still life and architecture or urbanscapes either, other than scale and occasional inclusion of human elements.) In fact, traditional still life photography was almost always of food – there’s an interesting avenue to explore for my next culinary assignment; it’d certainly be very different to the styles currently in vogue.

Better days past

Admittedly, it’s not something I’d consciously tried to shoot earlier. The main reason I’m now giving it a try is because I’m trying to further heighten my awareness of the quality of ambient light in order to improve both my available light photography (remember, light, subject, composition, idea) and of course the quality of my constructed light. This exercise has taken me down two paths: firstly, the use of film cameras forces me to get it right in camera, whether it’s observation or construction; I want to speed up my workflow even more by paring the amount of postprocessing work I have to do to the bare minimum and absolutely unavoidable. I’m also training my eyes to work as a meter; so far, not too bad – I’m within a stop most of the time, which is about as accurate as the meterless film Nikons can go anyway. (Some lenses give you half stops, shutter speeds are always whole stops; my ‘Blad gives me half stops on the lens.)

Real or artificial?

The second effort is focused on a study of the light used by the great painters of days gone by; they didn’t have the luxury of making their own in real life, so they had to be masters of observation, imagination and replication. In some ways, not having the technical constraints of execution probably made this easier; in others, it’s not easy to replicate realistic lighting entirely with paint! It of course goes without saying that the quality of light achieved by the Dutch masters, Da Vinci, the Italians hyperrealists like Canaletto et al was fantastic, if slightly impossible at times. Still, they conveyed mood perfectly with color and use of shadows. Though such light is seldom found in nature, we can create it now – and to some extent, make up the balance in postprocessing (the colour part, and dodging and burning for contrast, at any rate.)

Classical painting experiment I – hommage to the Dutch Masters.

Classical painting experiment II -hommage a Monet

The images in this set were mostly shot in the last couple of months with a variety of equipment, though there are a couple which date from earlier. I don’t think I’ve quite figured out what my style is for still lifes yet; I’m still in the imitation-experimentation phase, but feel quite drawn to darker imagery with strongly directional single light sources; I like to think of it as ‘tonal richness’. From a postprocessing point of view, it’s not easy to achieve because preserving the quarter tone contrast tends to result in oversaturated primary color channels, which you of course have to correct for individually, which results in hue shifts especially in non-primary colors. Once again, monitor gamut and calibration are critical in achieving the desired outcome.

This is not a carafe*

*Spot the Magritte reference

On the film front, since I’ve decided to eschew color in favor of the tonal possibilities offered by black and white – not to mention full end-to-end control over the process – it’s more about lighting management and attempting to visualize the native tonal response of the film, which is both very different from digital and not much like my normal postprocessed output, either. It doesn’t help that there’s the intermediate conversion step post-digitization which further complicates one’s ability to clearly imagine what the end results will look like. I like to think I’m fairly capable with Photoshop and can quite easily previsualize my end results at the time of shooting with digital, but that extra step has thrown me out. I suppose it’s a matter of consistency, practice, and getting to know the characteristics of one or two film emulsions very well.

Enjoy the images. I’m off to shoot some more. MT

On an unrelated note, if anybody has been wondering about the lack of On Assignment posts of late, it’s because I both simply haven’t had time on some of the more demanding recent assignments, or the setups haven’t been that exciting; just seeing me hold a camera in a still pose is not really very instructive or insightful. I’ve got a couple of jobs in the planning stages for next year that should be more interesting…

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Cutlery

Spectrum

Froth

Wholecut

Before lunch

Umbrellas

Study of a lamp

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Judging the 2012 Maybank Photo Awards

December 23, 2012 By Ming Thein 6 Comments

This article was originally published in The Malaysian Reserve on 7 December 2012. Reproduced with permission

For the whole 14th of November, a number of people sealed themselves into a room at Menara Maybank to pick five winners from a thousand shortlisted candidates. We looked for four things: light, subject, composition, and the idea; the ability to look into the image and at the scene through the eyes of the photographer.

Judging photo competitions is not as easy as you might think: firstly, photography is art, and art is subjective. What might count as a winner for adjudicator might not necessarily be so for another; I found myself both mediating disputes and causing them.

This is perhaps a good barometer for the contest itself: out of over 19,000 entries – larger than the 2012 National Geographic and DPReview photography competitions combined – there were enough that passed initial scrutiny to make life very difficult for us. We had clear winners in some categories but insufficient runner-ups; or a very close fight for first, or even no outstanding winner at all, with every candidate lacking something. More encouragingly though, several talented photographers entered and stood out in more than one category – our Photographer of the Year, Muhamad Saleh bin Dollah; Street Photography winner, Chau Sau Khiang and Studio winner, Hairul Azizi bin Harun in particular; and yes, we judged blind without knowing the identiy of the photographer.

These photographers showed strong images across disciplines, yet managed to maintain a consistent style, standard of technical execution and compositional balance. Contrary to popular belief, specialization is not always a good thing when it comes to the arts: the experience gained from being a multidisciplinary photographer helps you to apply different techniques across various subjects to achieve a unique look to one’s images.

Our Photographer of the Year had one quality that none of the others demonstrated: the ability to consistently edit and self-critique one’s own work. Whilst we saw a lot of technically and compositionally strong portfolios, the flow of the images submitted let them down; either there would be one black sheep image that stood out uncomfortably from the rest, or the images would be too similar and show a very breadth of skill. As a photographer, one important thing to remember is that you’re judged on the images people see, not the ones they don’t – conscious exclusion is therefore critical.

The results were both encouraging, and in a way, disappointing. Whilst it’s clear that there’s some real talent in this country and the level of enthusiasm was a very pleasant surprise, the average standard of some of the ‘professional’ entries was considerably below that of the amateurs. There is clearly better work out there in the media – I’m just surprised we didn’t see any of it entered. Professionalism means consistency and quality of delivery, not merely turning up to push a button. Many people would go to great lengths for the opportunity to make photography into a career – please don’t waste that; make the most of your opportunity and have some pride in your work. Any other way, and you risk damaging not only your own reputation but also that of the entire industry.

There was actually one entry that stood out to all of the judges: Kumaraguru Krishnan’s Photographer of The Year portfolio. It’s a series of out of focus images, with some vaguely people-shaped forms. Collectively, we believe that it was the only entry that really challenged creative boundaries and whose photographer actually stopped to question the rules. Even though the images may appear to be a series of mistakes, the consistency of theme, style, color – even the amount of defocus – indicate otherwise. The set was reasonably well edited – perhaps two of the images were too similar – but otherwise, it left a positive impression on us.

To all the photographers and entrants, thank you. For next year – assuming I’m still judging – what we’d like to see is a bit more creativity. The awards are a fantastic and very visible platform to get your work seen, and who knows, perhaps launch a photographic career. Don’t assume that rules must be followed (we had a landscape where all elements were precisely placed at the rule of thirds, but completely disregarded the natural flow of the scene and thus resulted in a boring, imbalanced image) – they’re merely there as a starting point to prompt you to think and challenge your eyes.

Don’t be afraid to submit something and not win – that’s an overly kiasu mentality. Instead, challenge yourself, and focus on showing us the way you see the world. At the end of the day, it’s that continuous need for challenge and self-improvement that differentiates humans from animals and the great from the mediocre. Remember, photography is subjective: a stronger photograph makes a stronger argument, and we can all gain something from a different point of view. MT

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, judging, maybank photo awards 2012, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, thein, thoughts

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