australia – Ming Thein

Photoessay: Australian sunsets

August 25, 2016 by Ming Thein

Boats under sky. This image is available as a 16×12″ Ultraprint in an edition of 20, here. Please include your telephone number for the courier at checkout.

Everybody likes a good sunset – I suppose it’s an age-old thing programmed deep into our DNA from the days when surviving to the end of the day was worthy of a celebration; not getting eaten or dying of disease was probably a good thing. Today it may be nothing more than the relief of surviving the boss or excitement at the start of the evening’s entertainment, but the satisfaction factor hasn’t changed. Every photographer has probably tried it at least once, and probably more, no matter how much it pains us to admit it. So why deny it at all? If anything, I’ll be the first to admit that doing something different is extremely challenging given the nature of the subject matter and limitations of perspective and position. It’s even more difficult because the very intense colors of an Australian sunset challenge the dynamic range of pretty much every camera – even the medium format monsters, requiring very careful exposure to avoid clipping a channel. Sit back and enjoy, whatever time it may be in your part of the world. MT

This series is presented in approximately chronological order, and was shot at various locations along the Western Australian coast on the Indian Ocean between Geraldton and Francois Peron National Park. I used a Hasselblad H5D-50c and various lenses, and post processed with Photoshop and Lightroom Workflow III and techniques in the Weekly Workflow.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: australia, landscape, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, ocean, photoessay, photography, sea, sunset, thein

Photoessay: Melbourne architecture

September 7, 2014 by Ming Thein

For a fan of abstract geometry, form and texture, Melbourne is an absolute paradise. Being a relatively new country, Australians seem to be far more open to experimentation with modern architecture, progressive design and integration with the unique landscape; the result is an interesting mix of 1940-s feel Chicago in places, Blade Runner and Utopia in others. The result is a place of extreme contrasts; you can see the evolution of postmodern architecture from simple geometric solids – cuboids, trapezoids, cones – to more complex shapes that appear to be formed of recursive application of those shapes. Any decorative elements are simply a further scaling and evolution again of that; there doesn’t appear to be much ornamentation in a classical sense. Perhaps that in itself is a definition of the current architectural gestalt.

Photoessay: Melbourne monochromes, part II

June 23, 2014 by Ming Thein

The continuation and completion of the previous photoessay.

It occurs to me I never addressed why these images were presented as monochrome rather than color – Australia has wonderfully intense blue skies (I suspect this has something to do with the ozone layer, or lack of it at those latitudes) which in turn produce extremely intense colours. Personally, and I suspect also for a lot of other people, monochrome images are associated with a sort of timeless quality; I don’t – and didn’t – want the impressions to be affected by my current color choices and preferences. It’s one of the reasons we associate certain color palettes with certain eras in history – think of the 1960s and 1970s, or late 1980s, for instance; unfortunately I suspect the current period is going to be defined by over filtering, low-fi and HDR. The least I can do is spare my subjects from that…

Photoessay: Melbourne monochromes, part I

June 18, 2014 by Ming Thein

This photoessay is the first part of my monochrome work from the Melbourne workshop in March; some of my students may recognise the images. I’ve been criticised in the past for not getting ‘close enough’ for my images to qualify as street photography, so I’m not going to claim it as such even though there’s no strict definition of the genre to begin with. Rather, it continues a theme I’ve been exploring for the past couple of years: the exploration of people in their environment, and the idea of modern man in context as a species as opposed to an individual. Perhaps I should take up social anthropology in my spare time…

Photoessay: Over Australia

April 11, 2012 by Ming Thein

This series was shot while on a long flight home from Auckland, New Zealand; the transit via Singapore meant that most of the flight was actually spent crossing the vast Australian landmass, over its northeast corner. The landscape through the window changed every ten minutes or so, presenting vastly different scenes – more abstract paintings than scenery. I was entranced, and didn’t manage to finish the presentation I was supposed to put together on the flight. But, I think it was probably worth it. MT

This series shot with a Nikon D700 and AFS 28-300/3.5-5.6 VR.

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