Articles – Ming Thein

A few tales of customer service and “professional” support in the world of photography

July 25, 2012 by Ming Thein

I’m not going to name names because anonymous allusions can’t be legally construed as libel, but I think it’s important that an open letter goes out to the brands/ distributors/ dealers – in a previous corporate life, we were always taught to treat a customer complainant as a gift: it’s an opportunity for you to interact with the customer, build a relationship and find out what aspects of your business’ operations require improvement. It’s also a way for you to distinguish yourself from the competition – recently, there was a scandal locally with KFC staff attacking customers who got angry after being informed that a particular offer had expired…that attack was videoed and on youtube fairly soon afterwards. Needless to say, that was not a good day for the company’s PR department.

Sadly though, in Asia, the majority of companies tend to treat customers largely with indifference – the attitude seems to be ‘you buy from me good, you don’t buy from me I don’t care’ – not the best way to do business. Especially with complex, expensive product which makes the relationship part of the business increasingly important.

For professionals, it’s even more important to have good backup – if you don’t, and something goes wrong on a job, or before a job, then you’re up the proverbial river of brown without an outboard. I make system selection based just as much on the level of support I’m going to get from the company as the capabilities of the gear. It’s one of the reasons I stuck to Nikon even in the days when Canon had clearly superior sensors.

So, I’m going to tell you a few stories – good and bad.

1. Quality control, part one

Several years ago, I bought a lens that I thought was possibly the best lens I’d ever used. It wasn’t cheap, but then again it really delivered the goods: I could see precisely why you were paying that much. A friend wanted one urgently for an assignment; I sold it to him knowing that the dealer had a second one in stock. Big mistake: the second one was a disaster; it was soft until f8, didn’t focus smoothly, and worst of all, after just two days, one of the aperture blades detached and jammed the entire iris assembly at at f2 (let’s just say I wasn’t paying for an f2 lens).

No problem, these things happen – the dealer didn’t have any more, so he referred me to the distributor, who should be able to do a swap without issue – after all, the lens was effectively brand new. A call to my contact at the distributor – with them knowing full well I was editor of a photo magazine at the time – told me that I’d have to send the lens back to the manufacturer for repair, with them flat out refusing an exchange and actually accusing me of damaging it myself. They were totally unhelpful in resolving the problem at all. Excuse me? I want the lens because I need to make pictures with it, not a broken object so it can give me a headache.

Long story short: in the end, I never resolved the problem. I landed up complaining to the manufacturer about their distributor’s treatment of customers (more than the lens problem); I had to threaten to write a nasty column in the magazine detailing my experiences before I got any hint of an apology. In the end it came personally from the distributor’s international CEO, and I got so fed up that I took a refund from the dealer instead. I have still not found another good copy of that lens, incidentally – it seems that the first one was exceptional, and my friend is a lucky b******. I eventually sold my entire system and dissuaded other interested parties from investing in it.

2. Quality control, part two

Earlier in the year, I took delivery of a new camera from the first batch. It had asymmetric focusing issues. (I’m sure mention of that is enough for you to know exactly who I’m talking about now). The manufacturer’s local professional support arm was both responsive, and concerned: I told to bring it in straight away so they could do some testing, and so I could pick up a replacement. (The latter was especially impressive knowing that the cameras were in extremely short supply worldwide.) Two days later, I did – and the replacement unit, as well as the loan units, and demo units, all displayed the same problem. No problem – I was then given a loaner camera, which was the previous flagship – for as long as I needed. A month later, I was told a new batch arrived – but opted to upgraded to a slightly improved model, instead. This was a bit better, but still not perfect. I was eventually called and informed that a fix had been found, and I should bring the camera in. I was lent a new flagship for all too short a day before collecting my camera the following day, repaired and functioning as expected.

3. Quality control, part three

Very recently, I received a lens whose price was high, and performance not even close to a much cheaper competitor. Worse still, it wasn’t even as good as the previous copy I’d had (and no, it’s not the same lens from story #1) – it was only sharp in the exact center, very soft off-axis, and worse still, asymmetrically so. The concerned distributor apologized and swapped it out, with their division head personally delivering the replacement – now that’s service. Unfortunately, the second one also seemed rather off – it was consistently sharp across the frame, but there was heavy ghosting and double imaging. I landed up going to the warehouse and testing every single copy of the lens they had in stock – it seemed that batch had either one or the other problem (ghosting/ softness/ asymmetry). At this point, the distributor was both mortified and hugely embarrassed, promising to send the entire batch back to the factory and demand an explanation – it’s good to know that he wouldn’t sell them to other customers who might perhaps not be as picky about their optics as me. I was given a much more expensive lens of similar focal length in exchange, no questions asked. And allowed to pick the actual unit, too – let’s just say I’m convinced the one I’ve now got is exceptionally good. Outcome: one very happy customer.

4. Software hiccups

On a previous assignment, one of the cameras I was using developed a software fault of some kind that caused it to lock up – that’s not good, but not so bad because every locked up camera I’ve had has always been rectified by pulling the battery. Most of the time, images aren’t lost, either. No harm, no foul. However, this particular incident resulted in the entire card being getting so corrupted that it would crash any Mac that tried to mount it – needless to say, image recovery software wasn’t an option. Worse still, all the images from one particular job were on that card – I was in the middle of the job. (In the end, I landed up submitting a mix of recovered images through forensic recovery, some reshot images and backup images from the B-roll. The client wasn’t happy because we didn’t have the first and best take; it was a large commission for an important client, whom I landed up losing because of this.) In these situations, a backup camera wouldn’t have helped because you can’t backtrack your steps and shoot everything again. Parallel writing might have helped, but the chances are that mirroring would probably have resulted in both cards being corrupted.

I understand that you can be extremely unlucky and have these things happen. But what I couldn’t deal with afterwards was the extreme arrogance of the manufacturer: whilst their employees were most helpful and apologetic, their MD flat out accused me of user error, and kept trying to change the subject. I offered to work with a software team to determine what the problem was so a firmware fix could solve it, but the offer was rebutted with the effective message of ‘we don’t need you.’

How on earth it is possible to create a card that has physically damaged sectors (but a perfect physical appearance) with a camera is beyond me. If I could fake something like that, I’d be a programmer, not a photographer.

In the end, I managed to get a replacement camera to reshoot the job which did have parallel writing and dual card slots, but that didn’t work properly either – it didn’t seem to be able to parallel write, and if you change the ISO immediately after taking a shot while the camera is writing to the card, then subsequent files wouldn’t save at all. You’d think this would be a fairly common operation, but I guess not.

Needless to say I do not use or recommend this camera brand for professional use, or any use where actually having images is important, period.

5. My bad

Pro DSLRs are mostly weather sealed. Mine was; I shot in monsoon rains without a hiccup. The problem came when I arrived back in my air conditioned apartment, and pulled the battery out to put in a fresh one – uh oh. A popping sound ensued, and some smoke came out. The charge indicator went from full to flat in a second. Turns out that the temperature differential created condensation inside the battery compartment, and that shorted out the camera. Still, after putting a third battery in (letting the camera dry out first, of course) everything seemed to work fine, except it wouldn’t save a file. I thought it might be the card interface.

I took it in to the manufacturer’s service department, where they accepted my credentials and issued me with a loan body. Three days later, they issued me with a quote – it seems they couldn’t find anything physically wrong with it, but the only way they could guarantee its continued future operation would be to replace pretty much everything but the outer shell, mount, prism and mirror assembly. This would of course cost more than a new camera! I elected not to have the work done, and wait for the camera’s successor instead (a matter of months). I was allowed to keep the loan body until that time – not at all expected or obligated, but a very thoughtful touch indeed.

6. I believe they call that dictation, not collaboration

I was asked to do a live watch photography demonstration recently; I would have to use a certain brand of watch, camera etc – which is fine – so long as I have the lighting equipment and diffusers I need. They expected me to produce live images like what you see in my portfolio – except I was told that I had to do it so a) the audience could see, and b) no Photoshop was allowed. I don’t know what they were smoking, but there’s no way you can produce a perfect commercial grade image without retouching; worse still, how would the audience see if all the action happens inside a light tent? I suggested streaming video from a GoPro positioned inside the tent (to minimize reflections) but they insisted it wasn’t possible because it was a competitor’s product. I was told to do it without the light tent, and far away enough from the watch that the audience could also see the watch.

Anybody who’s attempted microphotography of any kind will realize this is impossible: you now have zero lighting control, plenty of unwanted reflections, and worse still, what macro lens gives you 2:1 magnification and 50cm of free working distance in front of the lens?

I told the client it wasn’t technically possible; they threatened to use somebody else. I wished them luck. These are the kinds of clients that I try to avoid, because if you can’t pull it off, you’ll just land up making everybody look bad, including yourself.

7. A complete 180 turn

Many years ago, I reviewed a camera as part of my editorial duties at the magazine. It was a final production prototype, so the company was understandably a bit nervous about us publishing images – in fact, they wanted us to do a review with product images only, and no samples. That would obviously defeat the point of a camera review! I suggested that we would let them approve any images we chose to publish beforehand; they very reluctantly agreed.

Fast forward two weeks – on returning the camera and submitting images for them to okay, not only were they thrilled with what I did with the camera, but they also wanted to use the images for their promotional materials. Happy to do so – let’s talk licensing. Oh, sorry, they said, we’re not paying for images because it’s our camera. Um…does that mean a chef doesn’t get paid because it isn’t his kitchen? They replied that the PR value of being associated with our brand would be compensation enough. Okay, so would I get image credits? No. Could I at least get tear sheets to put in the portfolio? No. Could I list them as a client? No. Then how the hell would I get anything out of this at all?

In the end, I chose the worst images I could find from that set to publish in the magazine; I was told by several dealers that it was never a popular model (despite actually being a pretty good camera). I nearly switched systems to this after using it – but changed my mind completely after dealing with the company’s local management.

8. Take it first, pay me later, if you don’t like it, bring it back.

I have a trusted dealer here that knows I go through equipment faster than an alcoholic through a bottle of gin; I’m given trial periods, loans, agreed buyback amounts, no questions asked replacements for faulty gear, out of warranty service costs absorbed by them, preferential delivery for new stuff, freebies, and above all, excellent prices. This is unheard of in Southeast Asia, where the retailer is king, not the consumer. Needless to say, I’ve spent a small fortune here, and refer everybody who asks me where they should buy equipment. I’d buy from here on the basis of price alone, but my relationship with the owner and most of his staff means that it’s like visiting friends rather than doing business.

Moral of the story: be careful how you treat your customers, because you don’t know if the guy is going to be your next biggest customer, may not buy much but give you huge referrals, or even worse, run a moderately popular blog 🙂 MT

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Filed Under: Articles, Off topic Tagged With: article, customer service, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, pro service, thein

Depth of field and the importance of achieving critical focus

July 23, 2012 by Ming Thein

Reference polar bear and Noctilux. Nikon D700, AFS 60/2.8 G Micro

Your plane of focus determines more than just what’s sharp and what isn’t: it directs the eye of the viewer to the subject, too. The shallower your depth of field, the more exaggerated this becomes – to the point that with a very shallow DOF lens, a close subject and far background, you really won’t be able to identify what the background actually is.

Jazz time. Leica M8, 35/2 ASPH

All the more important that you choose the right plane of focus, then.

From a compositional point of view, the obvious thing would be to ensure all of your subject in focus – or is it? Not necessarily – sometimes you need just enough of it to be identifiable, and the rest can be merely a suggested impression. Take the eyes in a portrait, for instance. You don’t need to have the ears and hair in perfect focus, too. Less obvious is the need for context: today’s photographers seem to be fixated on achieving ever shallower depth of field, not knowing that in the past, achieving sufficient depth of field was a huge struggle that required the use of camera movements, long exposures, enormous lights and tiny apertures (I don’t know if any readers remember or have heard of Ansel Adams’ f.64 club – so much for ‘f8 and be there’). Part of the problem was the insufficient image quality of smaller media; the other part of the problem was the psychological conditioning of observers and viewers: before photography there was drawing and painting, and neither of those had any such thing as bokeh.

Rain and traffic. Leica M9-P, 50/0.95 ASPH

I used to be one of those chasing ever faster lenses – for the simple reason that earlier digital cameras were frankly pretty crap when it started to get dark – higher ISOs were all but unusable. If you couldn’t use an tripod (reportage work, for instance) then you had no choice but to accept grain (compromising image quality), use a flash (compromising ambience and context) or use a faster lens.

Fortunately, we now have sensors good enough that we don’t always have to shoot at f1.4 the minute it gets dark; we can do so because we like the look, but not because we have to – and that’s important, because it means we can choose just how much context* to include in the shot. Moral of the story: think very carefully about how much of the image needs to be in focus to tell the story effectively: too little, and you lose context because the subject has no stage; too much, and you lose focus and isolation, because the subject may not longer be as separated from it environment.

*By ‘context’, I mean background that isn’t subject. If your entire shot is subject, then there’s no context, of course.

At the crossing. Nikon D700, AFS 85/1.4 G

This brings me to the second portion of this article: focus. It might sound obvious, but ensure your subject is in focus. The non-obvious bit is that there’s in focus, and in focus. The difference is obvious at the pixel level: are you seeing single-pixel detail (or near enough, to the resolving limits of your lens/ sensor combination)? If you’re not, go back and try again.

It matters for two reasons: there’s nothing more annoying than looking at a slightly OOF image, and you yourself will probably look at the photo later and think ‘if only…’; and then there’s the ever-increasing pixel density that makes it more and more difficult to achieve critical sharpness at the pixel level. The higher the resolving power of a camera, the more finely geared the focus mechanism has to be in order to achieve critical focus. In the film days, this wasn’t so much of an issue because the ‘sensor’ had some thickness to it – the emulsion was of a fixed depth – however, with digital sensors, this ‘depth’ is all but nonexistent – so an image tends to snap in and out of focus fairly abruptly, with very little acceptable transition zone – a zone that gets increasingly narrow as your depth of field decreases.

Just enough context. Leica M9-P, 35/1.4 ASPH FLE

The reality is that with modern lens and camera designs, camera shake aside, your ability to focus has by far the greatest impact on the resolution and perceived sharpness of an image. It’s actually much more difficult to achieve critical focus with a fast wide lens than a fast long one – reason being that the transition zone between in and out of focus is far more gentle; an increasing reliance on contrast detect AF rather than phase detect AF does’t help, either.

Fortunately, there are many things you can do to maximize your chances of getting a positive hit. I’ll go through them for each of the common camera types.

Afternoon cigar. Leica M9-P, 50/0.95 ASPH

Compacts

1. Half press to focus, and gently release. You’d be surprised how many people just jab at the shutter button and wonder a) why their camera is slow and b) why images are blurry. The former is because the camera will take some time to find focus; the latter is because either it didn’t find focus properly (the electronics told it to trip the shutter when focus was acceptable or because of the jerk caused by the finger-jabbing motion and recoil.
2. Pick a high contrast subject. All compacts (except the Nikon 1 and some Ricohs, but those are all hybrid systems anyway) use contrast detection to determine when the image is in focus or not. The lens is racked back and forth until the portion of the image under the selected AF box reaches maximum contrast; this may or may not correspond to what you’ve selected. So, to be safe, select a subject with good contrast.
3. If in doubt, stop down a little – but not too much. Stopping down gives you more depth of field to cover focusing errors; on a compact with very short real focal lengths, you’ll find that f4 (or f5.6 at maximum for larger sensored cameras or longer focal lengths) is probably enough to ensure everything is in focus; any more than that and you’ll be seeing a reduction in sharpness due to diffraction.
4. Turn off that AF assist light. Not only is it hugely annoying and conspicuous at night, I find that it also tends to give a lot of false positives.
5. For moving subjects, continuous AF is nearly useless. The only way to reliably hit a moving subject is either to rely on your extended DOF and hope single AF is quick enough to nail it, or use trap focus by pre focusing on a certain point, and waiting for your subject to arrive.

Crossing. Nikon D3100, AFS 85/1.4 G

DSLRs

1. I repeat again: half press to focus, and gently release. The same applies for DSLRs and compacts.
2. And again: pick a high contrast subject. Phase detect AF sensors also like high contrast subjects – preferably something with either horizontal or vertical lines, depending on the orientation of your AF sensors.
3. Don’t let the camera do the choosing. Pick your AF boxes manually. If you don’t, you have no idea what the camera will focus on – it’s generally the closest thing in the frame, but that might not be what you want it to do. Especially if you’re shooting with a very shallow DOF lens.
4. Use continuous AF mode. Again, especially for shallow DOF lenses, a few millimeters of subject movement or photographer movement to or from the subject can affect sharpness greatly – to avoid this problem, use continuous AF mode and only lock focus if you’re absolutely certain you’ve got what you want. (A popular alternative is to put AF-ON on a separate button. I personally use that button to lock focus, because generally it’s easier to use one finger to activate AF and shoot off the shutter button alone, rather than two) And without saying, you HAVE to use continuous AF on moving subjects; make sure the focus box always tracks the subject.
5. Check your focus calibration. Set up the camera on a tripod, with an angled static target (I recommend the LensAlign) that lets you see if you’re focusing on your intended point or not. Adjust your AF Fine Tune settings if you have them, until you can reliably achieve critical focus. Do this for every lens you’ve got.
6. Get your mirror aligned. If you’re manual focusing a lot, you’ll want to get your mirror aligned so that what you see in the finder is the same as what the sensor sees – what this effectively does is adjust the rest position of the mirror so that the distance from mount to sensor is exactly the same as mount to focusing screen, over the whole frame.
7. Use a split prism or micro prism screen. Remember the half-circles in the middle of manual focus film SLR viewfinders? Those were focusing aids called split prisms, which let you see very quickly if something was in focus or not – all you had to do was turn the focusing ring until the verticals aligned. Why they’re no longer standard equipment on DSLRs these days is beyond me. Why they’re no longer available even as accessories, except for some third party companies, is even more mind boggling. The standard screens have a very narrow scatter angle, which means that there isn’t much difference in brightness between slow and fast lenses – great for kit zooms, but not so great for determining critical focus with very fast lenses; they lack the required snap. If you don’t believe me, try using the DOF preview button at f1.4, f2 and f2.8 – you’ll probably see no difference in the viewfinder.
8. Don’t trust the focus confirmation aids. The dot (Nikon) or beep (Canon) is somewhat misleading because there’s a range to ‘acceptably in focus’ – and the extremes of that range are pretty wide. It’s a guide only, not an absolute.
9. Use magnified live view and a tripod for absolutely critical images.

Untitled. Nikon D700, AFS 28-300/3.5-5.6 VR

Rangefinders

1. The most critical portion of the focusing system is the rangefinder. It is impossible to emphasize how important a perfectly aligned rangefinder is – especially when using fast lenses. Remember also that you have no way to visualize the focus plane. So: make sure your rangefinder is properly calibrated for the lenses you use – each lens will be slightly different because of cam wear, alignment and a whole load of other factors. Do not attempt to do this yourself, because there are four adjustment points – one each for near and far limits, one for travel, and one for vertical alignment. Not knowing which one does what can result in a bit of a disaster. Since there’s a feeler cam that always interacts with the focusing cam on the lens, the calibration can, and does, drift after a while, so check it annually or so if you use the camera frequently.
2. Clean the RF and VF windows! Dirt + smudges + oil = low contrast = difficulty in focusing.
3. Use a magnifier over the viewfinder if you’re using longer lenses. This helps by enlarging the central portion of the frame that contains the RF patch (at the expense of the outer portions) – you’ll find that since the RF patch occupies a large portion of the frame, it’s difficult to see exactly what’s in focus and what isn’t without the magnifier.

Waving to the stars. Nikon D700, AFS 85/1.4 G

Finally, remember the higher the resolution camera you’re using, the more critical focusing becomes – don’t go out for an upgrade of either camera or lenses until you’re sure that you’re getting all you can out of your current one. MT

For readers in Kuala Lumpur (and Singapore, when I’m there), I offer a Rangefinder Calibration Service for Leica M cameras.

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, focus, focusing, how to, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, thein

Street photography – the ethics of photographing random strangers

July 21, 2012 by Ming Thein

Paris, Leica M8, 21/1.4

Street photography is a genre that every photographer will try at least once in their career. Its broad appeal stems from the fact that you can do it anywhere; there’s a human element to the images that captivate the viewer, and if done well, can make for some extremely arresting images. However, it also requires balls. You have to get close enough to your subjects; and with people, invading personal space is uncomfortable (and possibly hazardous to health) for both photographer and subject. There’s a slight snobbishness about shooting with a longer lens, too – it isn’t seen as being hard core enough. In fact, these days, it seems if you’re not at f8, hyperfocal distance and sticking your camera and flash right up to somebody’s nose, then you’re not really doing street photography.

London, Leica M8, Zeiss 21/2.8

There’s another approach, though. I think it’s much, much harder to shoot wide open with a relatively wide lens – say nothing longer than 35mm – and shoot without your subject knowing you’re there. This is what I like to call the stealth method – you don’t want to draw attention to yourself, and better yet, shoot without even bringing the camera to your eye. It takes a huge amount of skill and practice to nail shots this way, because you must be able to both guess focus correctly (if manually focusing) or know where your AF box is going to go – and at the same time know your lens well enough to visualize the field of view. You also have to be incredibly fast about it, because moments are fleeting and not repeatable. I’m not going to name names, but there are a number of popular ‘street photographers’ who don’t and can’t do this because it’s extremely difficult to do, and the yield rate is quite low for ‘perfect’ shots.

London, Leica M8, Zeiss 21/2.8

*Shameless self plug: all of the images in this post, and all of my street photography, is done using the stealth method. When I was in practice and shooting hundreds of frames daily, I could zone focus accurately with my M8 and 21/1.4 at f2. Not anymore, sadly.

Oxford, Leica M8, 21/1.4

However, the biggest benefit to this approach is the fact that you don’t intimidate or scare your subjects. If you don’t make somebody angry, they’re far less likely to be unhappy or actively object to you taking a photograph. And if people do notice, don’t stare back or give a stern look – though it’s usually human nature – wave and smile, and you’ll be surprised how many people wave and smile back at you. They may even strike up a conversation and let you get a few more interesting images.

Paris, Leica M8, 21/1.4

There’s also the more subtle issue of quantum mechanics**. Basically, you as the observer won’t interfere with the scene – if you become a participant in the image, then the reaction you provoke from your subjects will necessarily disrupt whatever it was you initially wanted to capture. Bottom line: be anonymous, unmemorable, and blend in. If you’re in a touristy area, this might mean pretending to take random photos of everything and anything, whilst actually being very specific about what you’re looking for. Or it may mean using a compact and holding it in your hand, always being aware, and getting a grab frame in whenever you can. It means having to be both anticipative and reactive; you’ve got to be a bit of a psychologist to figure out who’s going to do what when, so you can visualize the scene in advance and be ready to capture it.

Prague, Leica M9-P, 50/1.4 ASPH

**I deal extensively with the Schrodinger paradox and its application to photography here.

This brings me to the real meat of this article: what are the rights and wrongs of street photography? A comment by one of my readers on another post inspired the post; yes, I do shoot a lot of random strangers, especially when traveling, and there are often shots I see but may not take for various reasons. I don’t think it’s so much lack of chutzpah as the feeling that it may not be socially acceptable or ethically appropriate in various situations; photographing beggars and cripples is one of those things. Using people to portray contrasts or as anonymous human-scale elements in a frame is fine, but the one golden rule I stick to is that I’ll never take a shot that’s demeaning or potentially defamatory. You wouldn’t want the somebody to do the same to you, would you?

Prague, Leica M9-P, 28/2.8 ASPH

Then there’s the issue of where and when – in most countries, you’re allowed to photograph in public effectively without restriction. There may be certain rules on tripod use because of obstruction or perceived ‘commerciality’ of the images, but that varies from place to place; in any case, most of the time I don’t use a tripod because of the weight and inconvenience. However, private property is exactly that: private. So if you’re told not to photograph, then you probably shouldn’t. And never use images for commercial or stock use if you don’t have the agreement of any identifiable individuals in the image. (Editorial use is different; you don’t need releases for people in news stories, but you also can’t really sell the images for anything else other than news.) Finally, I would be careful in politically sensitive countries or around police or other law enforcement agencies – they may have good reason for you not to photograph something, and ignorance isn’t a defense in court.

Kuala Lumpur, Leica M9-P, 50/0.95

Finally, remember that in an increasingly connected world, we aren’t anonymous. It’s entirely possible for somebody to see themselves on another site somewhere; in fact, it’s happened to me a few times. It may be because I just look at more images than the average person and thus have a higher chance of seeing myself somewhere, but I’ve also had people message or email and say they were the person in the shot. I usually just send the person a copy of the image by way of thank you; in any case, you can’t do anything commercially with it, so there’s no harm in releasing a copy.

Prague, Leica M9-P, 28/2.8 ASPH

I think if you stick to what your gut tells you about common sense and public etiquette, then you should be safe. Unless you’re a photojournalist, it isn’t worth getting the shot and then getting in trouble for it – there are exceptions, but they’re far and few between. Practice being fast and stealthy, but also courteous and friendly; and you’ll find that street photography isn’t so difficult after all. MT

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London, Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

Filed Under: Articles, Leica, On Photography Tagged With: article, ethics, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, shooting people, thein

Thoughts on Instagram and similar apps

July 14, 2012 by Ming Thein

No instagram, just careful exposure. iPhone 4

It seems that there are several distinctive ‘looks’ that amateur photographers recognize and try to replicate:

– High contrast black and white, sometimes with extra grain, usually all in focus
– Solarized/ retina-searing color, usually all in focus
– Partial bleach-bypass cross-processed color, usually with uneven depth of field or obvious lens flaws (Holga-with-expired-film)
– Very shallow depth of field of any sort
– The ‘miniature effect’ – pseudo tilt-shift

Originally, these styles were either conscious artistic decisions, or the consequences of not enough money and using expired film. They were chosen precisely because they looked unique – either because it was a difficult thing to execute well (using tilt-shift lenses, for instance) or because nobody else did it (cross-processing). The only exception to this is the high contrast black and white style, which was more a consequence of the limitations of the film chemistry at the time, and the requirements a picture of any recognizable description under difficult lighting conditions over fine grain.

However, now that we have a choice of how we process our images – and there’s sufficient latitude even in files from point and shoot cameras – a proliferation of either in-camera modes, filters or apps has taken hold of the photography industry, each claiming to be all you need produce one or all of the above styles.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it takes the skill out of actually having to do any of these things (learn to process B&W properly, either chemically or in Photoshop, for instance); on the other, it does make crappy camera phone shots a lot more pleasant to look at. Until you’ve seen perhaps five, after which they’re all the same anyway – you might as well just have say five or ten random images that come out of the filter, regardless of what you actually shot – after all, you want your grab shot to look like a HC-B, right?

Yes and no. While filters and apps are great for improving the ease of getting the look you want and promoting the general democratization of photography, it’s also sad to see that the vast majority of people can’t tell the difference between a sloppily applied filter, an Instagram shot, and something that was actually done intentionally with full control. It’s even sadder to see that there are a lot of internet ‘photographers’ and bloggers who claim to be the best thing since sliced bread, but would be completely lost without Silver Efex or similar. Strip the artifice away, and what are you left with? A shot with extremely weak composition.

This isn’t so say that mobile phones are useless as capture devices; far from it. My previous article on using the iPhone as a camera is very much in support of it. If you learn the limitations of your device, you don’t need to resort to overcooked processing to mask its inherent limitations – blown highlights or blocked up shadows, for example. There are definitely undoubted advantages – instant connectivity, the ability to share and abundant abundant processing power all come to mind. Apps that come close to replicating the functionality and control of Photoshop – PhotoForge is a good example – make a very good argument for what an intelligent camera can do.

I’ve long maintained that all of these post-capture applications – be they photoshop or filters – cannot materially add to or take away from the composition of the image, because that’s the one thing that’s baked in at the time of capture. No matter how badly you botch the processing, if it’s a strong shot, it will always remain a strong shot whether in B&W, or color, or run through the Holgarize filter on your iPhone. However, the reverse of course applies: garbage in, garbage out. Composition aside, everything else is merely distraction. The problem is when the distraction portion is so great that the viewer can’t tell the difference, or worse, is drawn in at first by the distraction then disappointed by the lack of substance – I admit it happens to me a lot when browsing through images on flickr.

Put it this way: putting effort into learning how to compose properly will pay off in a much bigger way than putting effort into figuring out which button does what on the app. Or if you want to do both, then at least your image will have some substance to it.

If I sound a bit cynical and bitter about the whole thing, it’s not because I see people doing things with ease that I do the manual way – far from it; if there is an easier, faster workflow I’m usually the first to adopt it. What bothers me is that there are plenty of these ‘photographers’ who are not only ignorant about what they’re doing – ‘oh, I’ll use the Velvia filter’ – without actually knowing what Velvia is, or how it’s actually meant to look. Worse still, they get preachy about it and suddenly become an authority on slide film because they have an app or a button that says so. Never mind the fact that some of us shot commercial product jobs with multiple lights on slide, back in the day when you had to calculate guide numbers manually…man, I sound old.

Remember: it’s a tool, not a religion, and before you spout opinions, make sure you can back them up – it’s quite possible the other person you’re talking to has forgotten more than most people ever learn about the particular topic you’re talking about, but is just too polite to say anything about it. With that, I stand ready to be corrected. MT

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: apps, essay, instagram, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, photography, thein

Revisiting the Leica M8: a cheap entry into digital rangefinders?

July 12, 2012 by Ming Thein

Latte Ninja. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

In the last few years, rangefinders (effectively only the Leica M system) have experienced something of a renaissance; I think partially due to the market being over saturated with DSLRs to fill every niche, and partially due to the full frame M9 which so many Leica shooters had been clamoring for. A frequently asked question is ‘why is DRF technology lagging so far behind its DSLR counterparts?’ After all, the innards are pretty much the same – sensor development and fabrication is so horribly expensive and complex that it can only be undertaken by a handful of either very large or very specialized companies; the electronics are largely FGPA-based (i.e. with reconfigurable chips) and there are plenty of good software coders out there – just look at the proliferation of Apple apps. Micro 4/3 has arguably pushed miniaturization of the electronic components even further – so it can’t be the body size that’s holding back DRF development.

Yin Yang. Leica M8, Voigtlander 50/1.1

Aside from the M9 and its derivatives (full review of the Leica M9-P here, and the M-Monochrom here), the only other digital true range finders that have made their way to market in the past were the Epson RD1 and RD1s (both using the same 6MP Sony APS-C sensor) and of course the Leica M8. All of these cameras have been M-mount, a sensible choice because it’s the most versatile and open of the RF systems – and of course has the greatest selection of lenses, from second hand $200 Voigtlanders to $12,000 Noctiluxes.

A Parisian cliche. Leica M8, Voigtlander 50/1.1

No, I suspect the reality is that what’s preventing us from seeing a DRF with competitive specifications isn’t technology, but the economics of market sizing: Leica sold about 30,000 M9s in the two-and-a-half years after launch; by comparison, Nikon makes about that many D800s every month. To invest such levels of R&D spending into a very niche product doesn’t make economic sense – even if you are charging three or four times what a comparable spec DSLR goes for.

Having said all that, you’re probably wondering about the title of the article: Leica M8? Is that a typo? No. Even with the technological, sensor and usability limitations (manual focus and built in frame lines for 28-90mm only, for instance) there are still good reasons why you might want a rangefinder. And even more reasons why you might consider technology that’s now realistically nearly seven years old – which is an entire geological epoch in the digital era.

Contemplating the journey. Leica M8, Zeiss 21/2.8

For a start, rangefinders are far less intimidating to your subject than DSLRs. They’re also smaller. Yes, there’s Micro 4/3 and all of its different flavors: but which one of them gives you a proper optical finder? None*. If you want an optical finder, and a responsive focusing system, a rangefinder is the only way to go. The lenses are also smaller, because they don’t have to house AF components or retrofocus/ telecentric designs to clear an SLR’s mirror mechanism.

*I’m deliberately leaving out the Fuji X100 and X-Pro1 cameras here; I don’t consider them to be rangefinders, and they have their own entire set of issues – slower AF than manual focusing a rangefinder being the biggest of them.

Cloister. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

Let’s assume for now that your priorities are to be inconspicuous, travel light, have an optical finder, and do documentary work in the 28-90mm range – let’s not bother with flash for now. That basically puts an M as your only option. You could buy a new M9 and lenses, but that’ll be painfully expensive; with three fast lenses (28/2, 35/1.4, 50/1.4 or 75/2) you’re already looking in the vicinity of US$30,000. And that might not even be your primary system, because if you want macro, precise framing for your ultra wide, or telephoto, you’re out of luck.

Compact. Leica M8, Zeiss 21/2.8

This is where a second hand M8 starts to make some sense: you can find clean, low-mileage examples in the US$2,000-2,500 range; pair that with some Zeiss ZM or Voigtlander glass, and you’re in business. Some of the Zeiss lenses like the 21/2.8 and 50/2 are outstanding in the own right, and the Voigtlanders offer unique options that aren’t available natively to Leica M (12mm and 15mm pancakes, or an affordable 50/1.1 anybody?). Let’s say we do the same system with equivalent fields of view (i.e. 28mm, 35mm, and 50 or 75mm) – I’d pick the Zeiss ZM 21/2.8 Biogon, the Zeiss ZM 35/2 Biogon and Zeiss 50/2 Planar or Voigtlander 50/1.1 Super Nokton. You could easily do that around the US$8,000 range, even if you buy all the lenses new. And if you decide for whatever reason that you don’t like the rangefinder experience, selling it on isn’t going to cost you very much, or be very difficult. Think of it as a rental.

One of those moments. Leica M8, Voigtlander 50/1.1

But what about the sensor and electronics? It is, after all, seven year old technology. The reality is that the M8 was a bit on the noisy side even when it was new; that hasn’t changed. However, it was also capable of excellent images at that time – that also hasn’t changed. (All of the images in this article were shot with a Leica M8 and a variety of lenses.) So long as you understand the inherent limitations of rangefinders, and those of the camera itself, you’ll be fine. Even if you have to shoot in low light. The sensors of the M8 and M9 are CCDs. CCD technology delivers a rich tonal response in the shadows and highlights that is very difficult to achieve with a CMOS; the tradeoff is noise and color accuracy.

Looking for information. Leica M8, Zeiss 21/2.8

Let’s talk a bit about the limitations of rangefinders in general, and the M8 specifically:
– Built-in frame lines for 24-90mm only, with a 1.3x crop factor – 32-120mm equivalent. Use an external finder if you need wider.
– 10MP CCD, ISO range of 160-2500, but I’d stick to 640 and lower for optimal image quality, and 1250 in a pinch. Either use fast lenses, or meter for the highlights.
– Realistically, it’s a single frame advance camera. The continuous modes are not worth talking about. Anticipate your shots!
– 6 DNG frames when the barrel is hot. Overshoot this and you’re going to run into card corruption and buffer dumping issues – which will require pulling the battery to unlock the camera.
– Inaccurate frame lines. They’re calibrated for 1m, instead of something that makes more sense like say 2m. The M8.2 had its frame lines updated to correspond to the view at 1.5m instead, which is an improvement, but no idea. Just frame with the outside of the frame lines. A little practice will help you to visualize what will be in-frame and what won’t.

A very friendly Parisian. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

– Poor battery life. Carry a spare.
– Crappy LCD. No point chimping on this camera, because the LCD is so poor it’s impossible to tell what’s in focus and what isn’t – just save it for the PC. You’ll save a bit of battery life, too.
– Metering issues with strong point light sources. The M8’s center weighted meter gets easily confused by strong point light sources in the frame; it’s very important to keep an eye on the meter reading. If it looks too high to make sense, then you probably want to override manually by using the shutter speed dial directly.
– No easy exposure compensation. Move the camera a bit until you find the exposure you want, then half press until the little dot between the left numbers appears – this locks exposure.

Turbine. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

– Manual focus. I’ve left the biggest issue for last. It isn’t manual focus per se that’s the issue, but focus calibration: if it’s out, it’s out, and you can kiss goodbye to sharp images. The rangefinder interacts with the lens through a series of very sensitive and precisely calibrated cams, and in my experience with several digital M bodies, they do drift – more so with frequent mounting and dismounting of lenses. It’s highly recommended that you get the body calibrated to the lenses you intend to use on the camera, and this goes for any digital M body.

Children. Leica M8, 35/2 ASPH

The M cameras tend to be extremely polarizing cameras. They’re either intensely refreshing, and offer a very different shooting experience, or they’re extremely frustrating due to their lack of flexibility. Rangefinders are cameras that force you to adapt to their way of working, not the other way around. If the way you see happens to fit this, then you’re in for a great experience. Unfortunately, the only way to find out is if you have a particularly generous friend who’ll loan you theirs, or by going down the used M8 route.

Canterbury Cathedral. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

I highly recommend sticking to one lens and getting to know it well; it will help in both keeping costs down as well as improving the quality of your images because it trains your eye to pre visualize. And there’s no harm in buying second hand Leica glass either; thanks to the recent trend of continual price increases, the lenses have been holding their value better than most blue chip equities. In fact, it’s probably the only class of photographic equipment that might even be considered an investment – certainly not the bodies, however. MT

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Spiral. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

Filed Under: Articles, Gearhead: Reviews, Leica, On Photography Tagged With: leica, m, m8, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, rangefinder, thein

How to tell if your D800/ D800E/ D4 has the ‘left focusing problem’

July 3, 2012 by Ming Thein

I’ve been asked this question more times in the last few days than I can remember: ‘does my D800/ D800E/ D4 have the left side focusing problem?’

Here’s how you can tell.

1. Pick the widest, fastest lens you own. A 24/1.4 is ideal.
2. Shoot it wide open, with the camera on a tripod, AF set to AFS single point.
3. Shoot a set of images at extreme left, center and extreme right, defocusing the lens manually between shots. Use viewfinder AF. Pick a subject about 2m away.
4. Without moving the camera, do the same but in live view. (This is so the camera focuses exactly on the sensor).

5a. If there is no difference in sharpness in AF and LV modes between the points across the frame, then you’re fine and don’t have a problem. (But you might of course find the edges worse than the center; that’s normal. LV and AF focused shots at each point should look exactly the same in a correctly calibrated camera.)

5b. If LV is sharper than AF for all frames, then you need to use AF fine tune and try the process again.

5c. If the LV shots look sharper for only some, but not all, of the points, (e.g. right and center points look the same for AF and LV, but your left point is much sharper in LV than AF) – then you have the asymmetric focusing problem and your camera has to go back to Nikon.

You might also find this article useful on how to use AF fine tune.

And with that, I’m off to send my camera in for the fix. Will report back later (or tomorrow, whenever it’s done)…MT

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Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: d800, d800e, how to, left focusing problem, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, nikon, thein

Common photographic mistakes by beginners, amateurs and pros – and how to avoid them

July 2, 2012 by Ming Thein

Beginners: Ever wonder why your photos don’t look ‘professional?’ Amateurs: ever wonder why you lack consistency? Pros: Ever wonder why you lose your edge or drive? Wonder no longer. This article deals with some of the most common oversights by photographers of all kinds, and how to avoid them.

Beginners

The missing subject. If it’s not obvious at a glance what is the subject of your image – i.e. what the photo is actually about – then you should probably ask yourself why you took the picture in the first place. If the answer was ‘because of the X’, and the X is not obvious, then you need to try again. The subject in a photo should stand out – by contrast, by color, by light, by motion, or by focus. In exceptional cases it’s possible to make it stand out by not having it, but this is very, very rare and requires perfect use of contextual information to allow the viewer to make inferences about what should complete the scene.

Poor perspective use. Pick your perspective before your angle of view. Wide angles are used to emphasize foreground subjects, telephotos to de-emphasize them with respect to the background. Don’t use a wide angle to ‘get more stuff in’ the frame, that will just result in boring images. Similarly, telephotos are not for ‘getting closer’.

Being stuck in the wrong gear. This includes the entire suite of woes of technical errors – exposure, focus, camera shake, white balance etc. Usually due to the driver relying too much on the camera to do the work for you: it will never get it right because there is no way the camera can know what the photographer intends to do with each image. You will have to take control somewhere along the line in the imaging chain in order to create the image you envision in your mind at the time of capture, and it’s better to do it closer to the capture process to minimize the subsequent amount of image quality degradation.

Amateurs

Worrying too much about gear. This usually takes the form of hauling around everything you own for every shoot and believing a new piece of equipment will solve some deficiency in your images that can almost always be traced back to photographic skill, or more specifically, the lack thereof. If you carry too much stuff you’ll always be second-guessing your choice of lens or camera. And if you keep buying new gear, you’ll never master what you’ve got – and be at a disadvantage because you can’t control your equipment. Before buying new gear, make sure you know exactly what it is with your current kit that is the limitation, and that it will resolve the problem – otherwise you’ll have both wasted money and compromised your photography. However, if you’re just a camera collector, disregard this item. In fact, disregard this entire post.

Intrusions and truncations into frame edges. With 100% finders being commonplace, there’s no excuse for parts of the subject being cut off at the edges, or obviously contrasting distractions intruding into the frame – like tree branches or phantom limbs, for instance.

Color issues. Odd white balance, or objects in the frame that are obviously the wrong color can create some interest in an otherwise boring scene – or things like that can just be jarring if they’re too far off the mark. This is especially important for skin tones or food. If you’re not sure what the correct white balance is, either adjust it accordingly with the eyedropper tool when converting the raw file, or manually white balance with a gray card. Don’t leave the camera to do it on automatic – if a channel gets clipped, the information isn’t recoverable. This is especially obvious with jpegs due to the limited tonal range available in the first place.

Black and white contrast issues. Amateur black and white generally tends to be too flat or too contrasty. The latter results in a loss of highlight and shadow quarter tones, resulting in an over-graphic representation of the subject and not enough tonal range to differentiate the subject from the background; the former is just dull and uninteresting to look at. It’s like knowing the chef had twenty different ingredients to make a meal, but he used only the gray, monotonous-tasting one.

Poor use of natural frames or leading lines. These little ‘helpers’ are to be found all over the place – the converging perspectives of a long hallway are a great example of this. They can help to draw your eye to the subject, but they can also lead your eye away from it if you put the subject anywhere else by the confluence of these lines.

Center-only composition. Few images work well with the subject dead-center or nearly there; the more dynamic images always have a bit of space before or after – I like to think of it as the anticipation or the aftermath. All cameras these days have more than one focusing point. I hear they even let you pick which one!

Lack of balance. I did say just now that center-subject compositions are boring; that’s because they mostly are. But at the same time, you can’t have frames where all of the action happens in say the bottom-left corner and the rest of the image is empty. Visual balance is a tough thing to describe, but fortunately it’s one of those properties of an image which is instinctively easy to recognize.

Incorrect use of depth of field. Too little, and the picture becomes about the bokeh – most of the images shot with the old Leica 50/1.0 Noctilux are like this – I can never understand why people gush over a picture of a boring fence or pile of bricks just because it exhibits swirly bokeh; to me it says nothing more than ‘I rely on my gear to create a style for me because I have no imagination!’ It is, of course, a tool – used well, it can enhance an image. Used poorly, well, you’re just another camera collector who takes pictures of fences. Notice I haven’t said anything about too much depth of field – you can always compose to use this to your advantage, because any secondary element of context helps to tell the story. However, the converse is also true – there’s no context in an abstract wall of blur. Conclusion: I’m beginning to think there’s a just right amount of bokeh for every scene – or at least a range; just enough blur to help you focus on the primary subject, not too much to remove all the context.

Poor timing and not being prepared. I see plenty of shots that I call ‘near misses’. This is when the idea is there, the technical execution is well done, but the timing is off – always caused by a moving element that’s out of position. There are two elements to getting this right – practice, and practice. You need to have some ability to anticipate what’s going to happen next; you also need to have an instinctive feel for how much lag your camera has between depressing the button and the picture being taken. And the only way to make this intuitive is by shooting and getting accustomed to it.

Professionals

Getting stuck in the creative rut. Not pushing yourself and relying on the same patterns of framing time and again may ensure you get the money shot, but eventually everybody else will be getting the same money shot, too. (Certain local celebrity wedding photographers where I live are notorious for this.) You need to be continually trying new things, improving and refining and always pushing. It’s an increasingly competitive industry, and a very visual one – if your images don’t stand out, then you’re never going to be a client’s first choice – they probably won’t even notice you from the rest of the pack.

Leaving the thinking to the client asks for and no more. This is related to the previous point – in fact, it’s the precursor to it. Clients come in a continuum: those who leave all of the creative freedom to the photographer, recognizing that the reason why they were attracted to your portfolio in the first place is because of your own personal style (these are the best clients of all) – to those that tell you exactly what they want, down to the last millimeter of positioning. The former type of client is rare; this makes it very easy to fall into being a contractor/ executor rather than being a creative.

Subcontracting out too much of the retouching and styling. Another related point comes in the form of an army of assistants and stylists. Given how much of the creative process is encapsulated in the post processing portion, it seems rather risky to leave the work to somebody else – even if they understand your original vision, chances are that it will take longer because there will be many revisions required, and in the end it may still not quite be what you initially envisioned. If you let this happen for too long, technology may move on to the point where you don’t even know how to achieve the desired end result anymore. And if your assistant or retoucher leaves, then what happens?

Not trying different subjects. I’ve had endless debates with various people in the industry on this topic – is it better to be a specialist and only shoot one thing, or a generalist and shoot everything? The reality is that it’s a bit of both. You have to be known for one thing – that becomes your go-to commercial support – but you need to be able to shoot many different types of subjects. There are two reasons for this – firstly, it lets you make more income from being able to offer clients additional services; the less obvious one is that shooting different things helps you to develop different techniques that can be applied across your particular subject of expertise.

Finally, there’s working too much. This sounds contradictory, but not taking enough time out to focus on personal shooting/ creative development can actually make you lose your creativity and consequently negatively affect your business. Fortunately when this happens, you’ve got less work and more time to experiment, so hopefully you do actually go out and do some personal shooting. I’ve definitely noticed that the more commercial work I do, the less I feel inclined to do personal work – I think this is dangerous because that’s probably the only time where you don’t have limitations imposed on you by your deliverables, and can let your creativity do its thing.

And on that note, I’m off for a walk. With a camera. MT

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

Infinite frames in a crop: compositional building blocks (or, the future of photography?)

June 28, 2012 by Ming Thein

Ion Orchard sunset. Leica S2, 70/2.5 Summarit-S

Here’s an interesting thought: sensor resolution is way past the point of far more than most people need – look at that recent Nokia 808 PureView and it’s 41MP sensor as an example. For most compact camera users, that’s just asking for trouble – file sizes, viewing, shooting technique…the list goes on.

What if we took a say 50MP compact 2/3″ sensor (not unfeasible) and just output no more than 5 MP from the sensor? You can zoom to your heart’s content before capture – either by taking a 1:1 crop or downsizing various portions of the frame; have a low light mode which uses pixel binning to reduce noise and/or improve dynamic range; and finally, make the whole thing speedy and lag-free by using a bright, fixed-focus wide angle lens. Or I suppose if you must have macro modes, make it AF. Finally, add some form of image stabilization to the mix, because that kind of pixel density is going to make most tripods look as though they have palsy. We’ve dropped the size, weight and cost of the zoom assembly; this makes for more compact, robust cameras. It also means that more engineering effort and perhaps even more money (though I wouldn’t put it past consumer electronics companies to want to hang on to every single extra penny and avoid R&D spending where possible) can be put into the lens, which should in theory improve optics.

The results probably wouldn’t be pretty at the pixel level, but the target audience is unlikely to care. And 5 good MP is more than enough for a clean 6×4″, or social media post, or email. Hell, it’d probably be enough for a decent A3 print if you use one of the pixel binning modes in good light. Think of it as digital zoom, but instead of getting degradation off the base pixel-level image quality, you get an improvement as you use more and more pixels.

However, I digress. As interesting as that idea is for the future of compacts – I wasn’t initially intending to suggest a new type of camera. What I wanted to explore are the building blocks of composition. Assuming everything is in focus, a scene – especially one shot from a wide angle perspective – can easily be decomposed into multiple elements, some of which contain the subject, some of which contain context, and some of which may turn context into a subject in its own right. All images are made up of these building blocks, and each can be treated as an image in itself. (Don’t try to compose this way in the real world, or you’re either going to go crazy or turn into a product photographer.) Examples may be – a face, a texture, a landmark.

Sometimes you don’t need more than a couple to create an arresting image – a portrait, for instance – sometimes you need as many as you can get to convey the chaos of the scene (crisis photojournalism comes to mind). What I notice in good photographers’ images is that all critical frames contain the elements required to tell the story, and usually in aesthetically pleasing relative placement, too. This is a learned skill; one can identify the critical elements required to tell a story, and then go out and look for a frame that contains them. I suppose the more control you have over the placement of the individual elements, and the more individual elements you can even identify in the first place, the stronger your image will be. Elements may break down into sub-elements – a wide shot may contain a portrait which can contain a face closeup; all of these things are building blocks.

This brings us full circle to the original starting point – how many images are there in an image? Let’s take the first image as an example:

This decomposes into what I think are five clear elements; the building and its relationship with the organic are the subjects.

What I find interesting is that each of these elements – or crops – could be an image on its own. And you can of course further subdivide these images down into their own building blocks. How many does one need to make up a strong overall image? One? Two? More? It’s hard to say; I think the answer is actually infinite. If you had infinite resolution, you could keep subdividing and cropping infinitely.

I know this is a fairly nebulous post, but stay with me here and you’ll start to see the genesis of an idea.

Let’s do the same, but in reverse. The frame below arguably works on its own as an image:

But then, if we include more context, so does this:

Or this:

And this.

We can keep pulling out…

…until we reach the initial (final?) frame.

Welding. Nikon D800, AFS 28-300 VR

Each of these compositions on its own would have worked as a frame. Similarly, continuously pulling out adds more and more context, until you pass a threshold beyond which the context dominates the subject. I framed the final shot that way because that was the farthest I thought I could pull out to maximize context, but at the same time isolate the subjects in the frame. Anything more and the subjects would have been too small to identify cleanly. You’ve also got to consider the final viewing size: smaller would mean physically smaller subjects, which would encourage tighter framing. Similarly, images that appear flat and cluttered at smaller sizes frequently work well when enlarged due to the greater amount of detail we can physically appreciate.

I started this article postulating on whether increases in resolution would lead to a new generation of pixel-binning super-sensored compacts; the more I think about it, the more I think it might even apply to photography as a whole. We have long past the point of resolution sufficiency for most purposes; shrinking pixel pitches mean that lens maximum apertures and diffraction-impacted apertures are converging. Eventually you’re going to have to buy excellently designed and well-corrected fast lenses and shoot them wide open to absolutely maximize resolution from the sensor.

Perhaps this will give birth to a new style or form of photography – we capture everything first, and then decide what’s important to the frame afterwards. A little bit like Lytro, but for composition rather than focus. Of course, we can do the same today with the super high resolution DSLRs, but there are limits to how much we can crop, and the lack of suitable lenses to serve as a reproduction optic. Such a camera – let’s call it post-capture framing – would be responsive due to lack of focusing needs; hyper focal would probably suffice; offer decent low light performance due to the large maximum apertures required; and be reasonably compact – rangefinder sized, perhaps – due to an optical system designed and matched to the sensor. It’d probably be closer in proportions to a cube, actually – once the lens is taken into account.

The skill of the photographer at the moment of capture would then be reduced to timing and exposure; the latter would probably be mostly automated, leaving only timing; however, this doesn’t make things any easier. The bulk of the work would now be done in post-processing – not just the digital ‘development’ portion, but also the editing, framing and cropping. I’ve always thought of editing as one of the critical skills for a pro – one’s reputation is based as much on the photos you show against the ones you don’t; being able to see the frame ‘in the wild’ and capture the moment in time is not an easy thing to do. Post-capture framing would give you all the time in the world to do that, which would make things easier somewhat – but also offer more opportunities and flexibility for other compositions.

This would of course raise some interesting IP issues: if another ‘editor’ cropped the original photo to a much smaller, unrecognizable frame, whose photo is it? The person who pressed the button, and just aimed the camera in the right general direction, or the one who actually saw the composition in the master frame?

It’s a brave new world, and an exciting time to be a photographer. Personally, though, I’m one of those very anal people who seeks to maximize all of the image quality they can get out of the camera; which means I don’t crop unless it’s to a non-native aspect ratio. Understanding the use of ‘building blocks’ to create a final composition, plus knowing when you’ve got enough context (or too much context, overpowering the subject) is a very important skill to refine, regardless of the technology involved. MT

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On the value of having a muse

June 24, 2012 by Ming Thein

Starburst. Olympus E-PM1 Pen Mini, Panasonic 20/1.7

This has been another one of those tricky articles to write – mainly because a lot of self-reflection went into it, and as we all know, it’s very difficult to do that and remain objective. The essays is illustrated with images that are representative of experiments that worked – things I was inspired to try with various muses, and in turn learned something from.

What is a muse? In its purest form, a muse is perhaps best defined as something that triggers inspiration in an artistic or creative sense. It doesn’t have to be an inanimate object; most artists’ muses tend to be people; in fact, most artists tend to land up romantically involved with their muses. Creativity is impossible to separate from inspiration, and inspiration is a very close bedfellow of attachment – attachment to an idea. (I know this sounds like Inception, but bear with me here.*)

*On an unrelated note, that movie contains one of the most spectacular dining rooms I’ve ever seen – from a design and architectural point of view. And I suspect it would be pretty cool as both a photographic subject and backdrop, too.

Floating head. Olympus E-PM1 Pen Mini, 14-42 kit lens

This attachment can take many forms. From a specifically artistic point of view, the main one is to try and capture the essence of the subject in the artist’s work; in fact, an extremely challenging muse is probably the best thing an artist can have, because no matter how hard they try, they will never feel as though they’ve done the subject justice – and this is what drives the growth of creativity. It’s not so much attachment to the subject per se, as an obsession with the desire to capture the subject in a medium or object other than the subject itself – which is in itself doomed to failure, because the more one understands about a subject, the more one realizes that it’s impossible to reproduce it in another medium – especially if the subject is something live and changing, like a person.

Prague sunset. Leica M9-P, 28/2.8 ASPH

So in effect, muses are necessary stimulants to creativity. There are a few things that make a good muse: complexity and multidimensionality is one; ease of access is another (you never know when an idea might strike, and you just have to try something out); finally, some sort of flux or dynamism is another – which is why most muses tend to be things that offer infinitely variable possibilities – for instance, Ansel Adams and Yosemite – or a person.

Journey ending. Leica M9-P, 28/2.8 ASPH

Having a muse is also an admission of the artist to imperfection – at least in their own minds. If the artist was happy with their work, they’d finish one piece of art – take one photograph – feel like they’ve nailed the shot, and then never look at the subject again. By trying to photograph something repeatedly, it says both that there’s perhaps more to capture than is possible in a single frame, as well as all of the past frames being insufficient or incomplete in some way.

Vienna at Christmas. Leica M9-P, 50/1.4 ASPH

A person may have many muses. You might, for instance, be inspired by a particular place or location; an object, and a person. Most of mine fall into the latter two categories, though the objects tend to be somewhat short-lived. I’ll start with the easy one – objects. I tend to accumulate objects of design. I have a huge weakness for things which have unique (but functional) design elements; things made of unusual or highly tactile materials and textures; and things that just look good. Past random acquisitions include a miniature fountain pen with no clip; a vase with a hole so impractically small that you would be hard pressed to fit even a single flower stem in it, but an incredibly unique texture; and fifteen stuffed polar bears.** And of course there are the watches, too.

**You may have already seen these make cameo appearances in various camera tests. Their white fur is an excellent test subject for highlight tonality, microcontrast, and of course fine detail reproduction.

Bob. Nikon D700, Voigtlander 20/3.5

Most of these objects will be the subjects of several photo sessions, or until I’m happy with at least one or two of the images I’ve captured. After that, they don’t change, so they don’t really serve much of a challenge photographically; however they litter my apartment as monuments to my design curiosity. But by far the biggest guilty pleasure of mine are cameras and lenses; yes, they are technical tools used to capture an image. But different cameras also force you to shoot differently and think about composition in different ways; a great example is a compact, or a monochrome-only camera. The former removes the crutch of bokeh, and forces you to rely on subject differentiation solely via framing and light; the latter forces you to see luminance, texture and shadow, rather than contrasts in color. Both are refreshing, and mastery helps you improve overall as a photographer.

Red vase and erstwhile contents. Nikon D5100, 60/2.8 G Micro

Then there’s the difference between rangefinders and SLRs – viewing and focusing method aside, I find the biggest difference is that a rangefinder forces you to focus more on your subject – you can’t see what’s in focus and what isn’t; you can’t frame precisely. Shot properly, both of those things subconsciously make you concentrate more on ensuring that the subject itself is the most immediately obvious thing in the frame, and the primary composition is so strong that whatever might be in the edges or out of focus areas of the frame become secondary, and do not detract from the subject. A new camera makes you want to go out and shoot with it, too – and that motivation is often enough to make you get images you wouldn’t otherwise have managed if you’d either stayed at home or not bothered to experiment with.

A Parisian cliche. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH. I don’t think I would even have attempted this with a big black DSLR.

Japan is also a source of endless inspiration for me – perhaps because the place is just so different from anywhere else in the world, especially the old world of Europe where I used to live, and the developing world of South-East Asia where I now live. I step off the plane and feel excited – those very differences that pervade every aspect of daily life force you to approach subjects with fresh eyes and curiosity; you take experimental risks and try things you normally wouldn’t at home or on a commercial shoot, where risk might equal loss of a client. I think every photographer needs these creative trips on a semi-regular basis as a way of forcing your eyes not to take things for granted, especially when back home. Seeing something done differently overseas tends to make you wonder what’s normal – it is of course all relative – but perhaps enough for you to find a worthwhile frame in the course of your daily life you might have otherwise ignored.

Waiting for the train, Sapporo. Nikon D700, Zeiss ZF.2 2/100 Makro-Planar

My biggest muse, by far, is my long-suffering wife. She is crash test dummy for new equipment and technique, a partner in crime for experimentation, and a handy anonymous body when an empty scene happens to need one to complete the frame. (She isn’t that patient, though, which also forces me to hone my instinctive composition and technical skills – the less one has to think about something, the faster one works.) And as a person, I find her endlessly fascinating*** – which means that there are always facets of her personality that I’m trying to capture; regardless of whether I do or not, I’ll always feel there’s something left over the next hill – and that motivates me to keep shooting.

***I suppose if this wasn’t the case, then I probably married the wrong person. Perhaps there’s a photographic metaphor in this – maybe in choice of camera or choice of subject – but that remains another topic for another day.

Medusa sleeps. Leica X1

Conversely, there are places I visit frequently with a camera – either as part of testing, or because I always have a camera of some sort on me – I will take some photos, but nothing in the location compels me to return. These I do not consider to be muses because they don’t inspire me; I just happen to be there and see something.

Bukit Bintang reflections. Apple iPhone 4

I highly recommend you find your own muse; it doesn’t have to be a person, or even a fellow photographer (my wife doesn’t really have any interest in taking pictures, and she is almost always surprised by the way the images turn out – despite having participated instrumentally in their creation). Rather, your muse is a reflection of you as a photographer – what is it that fascinates you? What inspires you? What makes you want to create? Finding and understanding that is a hugely important step to unlocking your creativity. MT

This post was brought to you by Ming Thein’s Email School of Photography – learn exactly what you want to learn, when you want to learn it. Muses not included, but I’m always happy to talk psychology to figure out what drives you. Don’t forget to like us on Facebook!

Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, essay, influence, inspiration, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, muse, philosophy, photography, thein

Some thoughts on digital camera lifespan

June 22, 2012 by Ming Thein

Some of my 2012 gear. Missing is the D800E, PCE 85/2.8 Micro, AI 45/2.8P, 35/1.4 ASPH FLE, Pen Mini, OM-D, Panasonic 20/1.7, Panasonic Leica 45/2.8, D-Lux 5 Titanium,a couple more SB900s, light panels…

This small mountain of gear leads to two very frightening thoughts. Firstly, there’s no ending in sight; one keeps accumulating more and more equipment in order to keep pushing the edge of what’s possible both from a compositional and artistic standpoint, as well as from an image quality standpoint. You’ve either got to have a great day job and very deep pockets, or some good recurring clients.

The second thought is around obsolescence. In the film days, the camera body and lenses lasted a long time; you invested in glass, got a decent body – one that fulfilled your personal needs as a photographer – and then picked the right film for the job. In that sense, image quality differences between brands were down to the lenses and the photographer. This is to say that if you put the same film in every camera, the difference in sharpness or acuity or color or whatever would be down to the lens only. If you wanted more image quality, you went for a bigger format – and thus a larger sensor. The digital equivalent to this would be having only one photo site design of a fixed pixel pitch; say around 4.9 microns, which would get you 16MP at APS-C, 36MP at FX, about 60MP on 645, and something silly on large format. For an equivalent size print, the larger format would definitely outdo the smaller format by an amount proportional to the difference in resolution.

A Parisian cliche. 2006 vintage Leica M8, Voigtlander 50/1.1

Except, that’s not quite the case, because there are technological tricks employed on some sensors that land up yielding image quality that isn’t quite where you’d expect along the size-quality curve. Bottom line: the camera body now plays a much more critical role in the imaging chain because it also contains the ‘film’, and this isn’t something you can change when the equivalent of a new emulsion is released.

Cameras from the 1950s and 1960s are still alive and well today – and in some cases, quite plentiful. Yes, some may have sticky shutters or mechanical issues due to neglect or lack of servicing, but the reality is that they were a) built to last and b) will continue to do a fine job so long as one can find film for them. The chemical process for film processing hasn’t changed much in the last forty or so years. Negatives can (probably) last hundreds of years with proper archival and storage conditions – how long, exactly, is anybody’s guess.

Minute repeater works. 2005 vintage Nikon D2Hs, 85/2.8 PC Micro

However, we’re facing some very real issues with digital, and ones that matter to all digital photographers. Let’s examine these individually.

Camera life. In the film days, shutters may have been rated to 50,000 or so exposures for a professional body – the reality is that nobody but a professional would shoot this many frames; film always has a per-shot cost and effort cost associated with it. You think a bit harder before letting off a frame, and this generally results in fewer frames but more keepers. Since digital is free, photographers experiment a lot more (and learn a lot faster) – but this means that you’re probably going to wear out a shutter if you are a dedicated shooter and keep a camera more than a few years. Even the professional grade cameras have shutters rated to around 300,000 or so exposures; I know of many sport photographers whose cameras are well over the million-frame mark. I’ve had to replace shutters a couple of times on my own cameras. This in itself isn’t a big deal, so long as parts are available. However, if something goes wrong with the electronics, your camera becomes a brick the minute the manufacturer runs out of spare circuit boards – the chips are not something you can repair with an experienced hand, unlike mechanical shutters for instance.

Shipyard worker. 2007 vintage Panasonic TZ3

Lenses. Even modern lenses are not immune to this – yes, they all still use glass and helicoids, but they also rely on a lot of electronics to control autofocus and aperture functions. Let’s not even talk about those with magnetically-activated gyroscopes for stabilization. Even the coreless ring-shaped motors used to achieve fast focusing aren’t infallible; early Nikon AFS lenses are notorious for requiring that expensive repair once the lenses start making squeaking noises. Again: you’re up one of those brown creeks with no paddle if something electronic gives way. The sole exception to this is the entirely mechanical glass by Leica and Zeiss; those will probably survive the apocalypse.

Batteries and cables. Anybody who’s got an older camera that uses Ni-MH or Ni-Cd cells is going to relate to this one instantly: once the batteries are no longer available, you’ve got a brick. And the inherent nature of the chemistry means that this can be as short as five years, or perhaps ten if you’re lucky. I’m glad I don’t have any that fall into this category, but I do have some lithium cells that were so heavily used that they’re pretty much useless now; I’d be worried about not being able to get replacements for these in the future. (Fortunately, I’m paranoid about spare batteries, so I have at least two for each camera I use.) Once supplies dry up off ebay, that’s probably the end of the line – and who even knows how old or new those stockpiles are. One thing I really hate about some cameras is the necessity to use proprietary connectors for things like video out or even USB – if you lose or damage that little adaptor or cable that came in the box with the camera, you’re probably out of luck getting a replacement unless there’s a huge ecosystem for the camera – but so far, no camera connector has reached that kind of popularity. At least some makers see sense and use standard mini-USB cables or 3.5mm minijacks. And putting the two together, the same of course goes for battery chargers…

A quiet moment. 2004 vintage D2H, with a 1960s vintage 55/1.2 SC pre-AI converted Nikkor

Storage media. This one concerns me quite a lot: we’ve already seen big shifts from one type of digital media to another, with almost zero support once a type of card or drive or storage goes out of fashion. Self-burned CDs from just a few years ago seem to be hit and miss when it comes to readability; early DVDs are a tossup because of the format used; and has anybody tried to mount an old drive recently? They don’t always work. I’ve found the best way to keep your files and backups accessible is to use external hard drives, limit the amount of uptime they have (if you’re not using them, don’t turn them on) and change them every couple of years. This serves several purposes: firstly, maximizing forward compatibility; secondly, giving you more space; thirdly, hopefully more reliability as technology matures; and finally, the old drives can be kept somewhere as an incremental backup. And drives fail, too – you might want to take a look at my article on storage and backups.

Online. If you’re storing files online, make sure you have an offline backup. I’m sure Kodakgallery had a lot of users at one point – at least until they shut down this month. I dread to think what’s going to happen to their servers when everybody’s aunt and uncle suddenly realize that all of their photos are there and must be downloaded immediately, or worse still, forgets completely they’re there at all. The problematic thing is that there is usually no automated backup for these things – you have to download the images one by one. If say Flickr went down, I’d lose the 13,800 or so images I’ve got there – at least the small, web-sized archives – and that wouldn’t be so critical, except that all of the images from this site are hosted there. Still, it would be recoverable – but not great. And problematically, there’s no way of executing a backup to this, either.

File compatibility. Of all the future proofing problems faced by us digital users, this is by far the biggest. I’m no so worried about JPEGs, because it seems that as a format it’s here to stay; even the improved JPEG 2000 format introduced by the same group that created JPEG compression originally didn’t really make much of a dent in the photography world. What worries me more is the ability to open all of those RAW files in future; so far, Adobe Camera Raw is doing a great job of maintaining full compatibility with older cameras (which explains why the update files are now enormous), but I wonder what will happen if that platform shifts in future. We can only hope the size of the demand for such support is large enough to support a continuing market for such products. A second set of DNG files may be an option for increased future proofing. However, it’s well-known that ACR isn’t the best converter for all files, and better image quality can be obtained via other converters for specific cameras – so I’d be concerned about what information isn’t being fully captured and transferred over. I don’t have a solution for this other than keeping a full set of uncompressed TIFF files, whose encoding is relatively simple and shouldn’t be too difficult to retain support for in future.

End of the line. 2007 vintage Panasonic TZ3

There’s one final issue I’d like to touch on in this article, and that’s the ecosystem. I’m not about to go greenpeace; I’m referring specifically to the support tech that’s required to maintain a full digital workflow; this includes everything from the memory cards to cables to batteries to the computer involved. Image quality competitiveness aside (more on sufficiency in another article), I think you’re going to have to think about a full upgrade cycle for your support gear every three to five years. It’s no longer your camera body you’ve got to cost in, but also a new computer to handle the larger files, Photoshop upgrades to get the most out of those RAW files, bigger memory cards and hard drives to store everything on, maybe even a higher resolution, more accurate monitor. And all of this of course costs money.

There are two ways of dealing with this – as a hobbyist, I’d recommend buying one complete (and compatible) set, then using it until one critical component dies or absolutely has to be replaced. This should get you at least five years of use, probably more. The upside is lower money out, but also close to zero residual value. As a professional, you probably have to consider the other extreme – upgrade as soon as an improvement is available. Your used gear still has resale value, and this can be used to offset the upgrade costs. Incremental upgrades to the supporting equipment can be made with relatively small spending. (I don’t like to use the word ‘investment’ when it comes to equipment, because it is really a losing proposition.) It also keeps you competitive. I’m a masochistic early adopter, so I’ve always taken the latter route. I think it’s very important to pick one approach and stick to it (or buy film, then consider owning only one camera and lens for the rest of your life) – otherwise you’re going to be stuck in the expensive no-mans’ land inn the middle. MT

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