On Photography – Ming Thein

Photoessay: San Francisco monochromes, part two: channeling Winogrand

June 21, 2013 by Ming Thein

One of the exercises I did at the last round of US workshops was an exploration into finding style. Naturally, having taken both of the groups in San Francisco to see the Garry Winogrand exhibition that was on at SFMOMA, there was more than a healthy curiosity amongst the groups to attempt to shoot replicate his way of shooting. I of course had to demonstrate. Whilst I don’t particularly care for his off-center/ misaligned/ ‘loose’ framing and various forms of blurring, I do appreciate his sense of timing and getting into the moment and the scene. Plenty of shooting from the hip or with the tilt screen and a wide lens ensued; the OM-D and 12/2 was weapon of choice. Enjoy! MT

Photographic aspirations, part two: reality, and getting there

June 19, 2013 by Ming Thein

Light at the end of the tunnel: but it’s a long climb, and are you going up, or down?

Reality often isn’t as glamorous as the dream.

In the first part of this essay, we explored the dissonance between the photographer we are, the photographer we think we want to be, and the photographer we actually want to be; today, we’ll wrap up by looking at how you can get there.

Photographic aspirations, part one: who we are, vs. who we want to be

June 17, 2013 by Ming Thein

The disconnect. Leica M 240, 50/2 APO, Yangon.

Everybody has a dream. More realistically, everybody who picks up a camera has some idea – conscious or not – of what they want to get out of it: be it a simple record of an event, or delusions of artistic grandeur. More often than not, there’s a truly enormous gap between where the photographer wants to be, and where they think they are. There yet another gap between where they think they are and where they actually are. For most, the levels tend to shake out with aspiration coming first, followed by self-perception, and then finally, reality. As with most things photographic, there’s just as much psychology involved as technicality.

Photoessay: San Francisco monochromes, part one

June 15, 2013 by Ming Thein

I can’t really say these have a common theme other than reporting on life in the city; however, subjects, light and various urban geometry cooperated at times to make some images I was rather fond of. Enjoy! MT

Thoughts on street photography with medium format

June 11, 2013 by Ming Thein

Ostensibly, this is already perhaps not the most practical of ideas; if one is extremely masochistic, things can be compounded further into the really bad idea class by using film. And a manual focus camera. Without a meter. I think it takes a certain amount of insanity – or at least a healthy dose of optimism – to even attempt it. Street photography (the genre itself being discussed in this previous article) is the kind of thing that’s handled best with a responsive, unobtrusive camera that also has a goodly amount of depth of field for a given aperture, plus what I like to think of as being very forgiving of slightly loose shot discipline. This generally means good high-ISO ability, perhaps a stabilization system, a low-vibration shutter and decently large pixels to make the effects of camera shake less obvious.

Defining cinematic

June 5, 2013 by Ming Thein

Over the last couple of posts, we’ve looked at the qualities of bokeh, and some examples of cinematic photography in New York; although one of the most obvious hallmarks of the cinematic style is an abundance of very out of focus zones, in reality there’s a lot more subtlety to it. Since this is one of my most frequently used and well-developed styles, I felt that perhaps a little intellectual exercise was in order.

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Photoessay: New York street cinematics

June 3, 2013 by Ming Thein

Possessiveness of taxis is a New York thing

I found the people and streets of New York to be eminently suited to a bit of cinematic street photography. Perhaps it’s the fact that so many movies have already been filmed in New York, or it’s the quality of light filtering between and reflecting off buildings, or it’s the various diverse characters that live in the city. These are little moments, vignettes and slices-of-life; I don’t want to use the word ‘stolen’, but it does sometimes feel like one is peering into a pre-coreographed scene and simply borrowing a frame. I sincerely apologise in advance for having some fun with the captions.

Revisited: A word (or ten) on bokeh

June 1, 2013 by Ming Thein

This article is one of my first from the archives, brought up, dusted off and refreshed with new images in preparation for the next mini-series on cinematic photography: let’s just say that bokeh matters, and having a little pre-prep can’t hurt. Plus, things tend to get buried in the depths of time and forgotten…

Bokeh. Possibly one of the most misunderstood, yet most bandied-about terms in the world of photography today – right up there with dynamic range, resolution, A-is-noisier-than-B and other such myths.

The term is a derivative of the Japanese word boke, which doesn’t really have a good translation into English. I believe Mike Johnston was the one who coined/ Anglicised it, though there may be earlier derivations. The closest we can get is ‘the nature/ character of blur’. It’s certainly not quantitative in any way – what constitutes good bokeh and what is bad or ugly bokeh is very much up to the viewer. There are some who like ‘busy’ bokeh where out of focus areas take on double images, swirls or other patterns; some like the pentagons and other shapes on highlights. Yet others prefer a uniform wall of gaussian blur foreground-background.

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Travel photography

May 30, 2013 by Ming Thein

New York City

After writing the article on why we photograph and fresh off the back of several overseas trips, I wanted to share a few thoughts on travel photography. It seems that like street photography, the ‘travel’ genre is almost a generic catch-all bucket for images that don’t fit anything else; it’s a bit of portrait, a bit of landscape, a bit of street, a bit of still life, a bit of architecture, and, well, just ill-defined.

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Photoessay: Vignettes from a Sudanese wedding

May 28, 2013 by Ming Thein

Recently, I was a guest at a rather interesting (and crazy) wedding celebration – a close Sudanese family friend’s daughter. Needless to say, I brought a camera – the OM-D and 45/1.8 – but to use strictly in an unofficial capacity. If you get the impression that the feel was very much 1001 Arabian Nights, that’s because it’s not too far off the mark. Enjoy! MT