Ming Thein | Photographer

Robin visits South Africa, part II

December 16, 2018 by Robin Wong 4 Comments

It was hard to believe how close we were able to get to the wild animals in Madikwe Game Reserve. Our park ranger drove us as close as 5 meters from the animals! The feeling of potentially fatal danger was persistent even while we busied ourselves composing images. The animals kept turning toward us and glancing at us from time to time, but they never showed any sign of aggression or agitation. I guess they’re so used to human presence with the never-ending stream of tourists that pass through the reserve. I was thrilled to be able to continue shooting my portraits of strangers, only this time my subjects were wild animals instead of humans.

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Filed Under: Robin Wong Tagged With: mingthein.com, olympus, robin, Robin Wong, south africa, travel, wong

Robin visits South Africa, part I

December 15, 2018 by Robin Wong 17 Comments

Let me begin by expressing my gratitude for the overwhelmingly positive response to my recent announcement about joining the Olympus Visionary team. I am grateful to have such supportive readers and have come this far thanks to your support. So please do continue to visit the site regularly as MT and myself endeavour to produce content.

From December 7th to 13th, I traveled to South Africa with a group of Olympus Visionaries from Asia Pacific. This photography trip was fully sponsored by Olympus with the objective of encouraging the 19 photographers from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea and Australia to share ideas, inspire each other and to work more closely with Olympus. We went to Madikwe Game Reserve for safari shoots and stayed at the Tau Game Lodge. We spent 3 days going out in the field, trying to capture wildlife and nature shots. This particular trip was full of new experiences for me. For this first part of my South Africa series, I will share wider landscape and environmental photographs of the locations we visited.

All images shot with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and M.Zuiko PRO lenses (300mm F4 PRO IS, 40-150mm F2.8 PRO and 7-14mm F2.8 PRO).

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Filed Under: Robin Wong Tagged With: mingthein.com, olympus, robin, Robin Wong, south africa, travel, wong

Guest review: the 2018 Nikon Z6

December 12, 2018 by Praneeth Rajsingh 31 Comments

MT: Today’s thoughts on the Z6 should be thought of as an accompaniment to my Z7 review and are courtesy of the man behind the scenes and one of the partners in my watch venture, Praneeth Rajsingh, who’s the one keeping me organised and pointing in the right direction these days. I tried to get him to buy the Z7, but he knows his sufficiency threshold…

Hello! While I’m usually involved behind the scenes, Ming thought it might be interesting to have me share my thoughts on the new Nikon Z6 – which I recently acquired. As an amateur photographer who only buys gear to meet his needs (and budget), my review will not be the comprehensive and in-depth coverage that MT excels at, but I hope some of you find it useful.

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Filed Under: Gearhead: Reviews Tagged With: gearhead, mingthein.com, nikon, praneeth, praneeth rajsingh, rajsingh, review, z6, z6 review

Photoessay: vignettes of melancholy and longing

December 9, 2018 by Ming Thein 31 Comments

Here’s a slightly unusual (and personal) curation, matching my usual mood: I hugely cut down the amount of travel I’ve been doing (after pretty much ten years of non stop, at least twice a month work trips), starting in the second half of 2017 and continuing on to 2018. But the last couple of months have reminded me precisely why I made that choice: yes, you get to do some fun stuff, but it’s also fatiguing, you don’t see your family (worse, if your wife happens to have an opposite travel schedule which means you’re never in the same place at the same time), hotels are soulless, and working off a laptop with a malfunction keyboard (hello, double alphabets) and trackpad (goodbye, click!) when you’re used to a dual screen 27″-32″ setup is positively claustrophobic (and unproductive). Hell, I even miss my car and my polar bears. Sometimes these feelings concentrate, and leave you with an odd sort of creative inspiration that makes you search the back catalog and realise that at some point – many points, really – in your previous travels, you’ve felt exactly the same way. And it somehow made you a little creative at the time. And I have to say, in an odd way – that cheered me up. MT

Shot over a long, long period of time with a wide variety of equipment. Mostly processed with PS Workflow III.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: melancholy, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photoessay, photography, thein, vignettes

Congratulations to Robin Wong – ‘Olympus Visionary’

December 7, 2018 by Robin Wong 95 Comments

I am proud and happy to announce that I have recently joined the Olympus Visionary program. In this short article, I’ll explain my decision of becoming a brand ambassador for Olympus Malaysia as well as how this changes my writing as a photography blogger moving forward.

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Filed Under: Robin Wong Tagged With: olympus, robin, Robin Wong, wong

Exploring Pulau Lang Tengah

December 6, 2018 by Robin Wong 10 Comments

At a recent Olympus event for bloggers and social media influencers, I was requested to conduct a night photography workshop at Pulau Lang Tengah – an island off the eastern coast of Malaysia. Since it was the start of the monsoon season, we anticipated rain and cloudy weather which is counter-productive to night sky and landscape shooting. I had most of the day before sunset to myself – a good opportunity to explore the island. I’m a land creature, allergic to the presence of water. So scuba diving or snorkeling was a non-starter, but given the great location and my purpose for being there, landscape photography was the natural answer!

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Filed Under: Robin Wong Tagged With: exploration, island, mingthein.com, photography, pulau leng tengah, robin, Robin Wong, wong

Photoessay: Autumn again

December 3, 2018 by Ming Thein 31 Comments

Autumn in Japan these days seems to come later and later – the end of November or early December, in some areas further south. It probably ranks second only to the cherry blossoms as the season for landscapists to chase; I can’t say I did that but I did time the visit to coincide with some color in at least one of the locations we visited. It’s perhaps also my favourite season of the year as it’s the one I see the least of, living in the tropics – we get summer and an approximation of winter (monsoons) and spring isn’t that different, but the leaves never turn, the landscape doesn’t become warm, and the city isn’t redolent of reminiscence of the year that’s just passed. I’m sure I’d probably get bored of it if I lived at higher latitudes, but for now, please enjoy a (even) more abstract set than my usual landscapes. MT

This series was shot in various parts of Japan in the last year, with a Nikon D850 and 24-120 VR, and post processed with Photoshop Workflow III.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: autumn, japan, landscape, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photoessay, photography, thein

Wide angle urban exploration

November 30, 2018 by Robin Wong 11 Comments

During one of my recent short walks from a train station to a nearby cafe, I chanced upon a stretch of abandoned residential flats. It had been a while since I last did urban decay photography and the thought of exploring these flats got me and my friends excited. Therefore, after some planning and gathering an adequate number of people we made our way into these abandoned buildings and started shooting. This was the perfect opportunity for me to exercise my wide angle compositional skills, something that I do not do frequently enough. I brought along the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and M.Zuiko 7-14mm PRO lens for this particular shoot.

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Filed Under: On Photography, Robin Wong Tagged With: mingthein.com, photography, robin, Robin Wong, urban exploration, wong

Understanding color, from a workflow perspective: part 2

November 27, 2018 by Ming Thein 23 Comments

Continued from part 1

It is possible to make a calibration profile for every camera that takes you back to neutral color and tonal response; I do precisely this in PS Workflow III because I need to use a variety of tools for the range of work I do. It allows me to have a consistent color palette/ tonal signature across all of my images, regardless of hardware: this is important because some projects last for years and I may change hardware several times across the duration; but I cannot change the way the images look too much, else you sacrifice visual consistency. I also do this to get control over the output palette: subtle biases can influence viewer emotional response; this is one of the many tools in a storytelling photographer’s arsenal. Note: whilst some cameras allow for a wide range of adjustability of the in-camera processing, none of them allow full HSL adjustments (which would be required to get a totally neutral profile). Currently, the Olympus Pen F comes closest – but you still can’t fully escape the slightly warm default tuning, nor can you compensate on the fly for scenes of wildly different contrast levels (which our eyes do automatically).

Understanding color, from a workflow perspective: part 1

November 24, 2018 by Ming Thein 38 Comments

We first need to understand a bit of history to appreciate the origins of ‘house color’ or ‘company color’ or a particular tonal palette: in the early days of color photography, it simply wasn’t possible to make a film emulsion that responded equally to every color, much less mirrored the response of the human eye to the visible spectrum. It’s also important to note that a recording medium’s color response and luminosity (tonal) response aren’t the same thing but they are linked; further complicating things. And we haven’t even started talking about how different individuals’ eyes respond differently to color*. The best manufacturers could do was offer a range of emulsions (corresponding to a range of different chemicals that had different responsiveness to light) that gave photographers choice. It’s one of the main reasons images from certain eras have a particular look to them: the world didn’t offer different colors or fade; what we’re seeing is a mixture of time-sensitive oxidation of pigment in the output image, and the limitations of the recording medium at the time. As emulsions improved, so did the spread of color that could be recorded. The world didn’t become more realistic: our means of recording and displaying the recording did.

*As you get older or if you have cataracts, certain frequencies become blocked/absorbed by the lens or liquid portion of your eyeball, limiting what reaches the retina. And the retina itself may well not be operating at peak tonal response, too.