creativity – Ming Thein

What is creativity?

August 15, 2020 by Ming Thein

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“Creativity” is a term we hear increasingly thrown around and applied to things that perhaps are both not obvious immediate recipients, and simultaneously perhaps the most needing of such treatment. Ask any non-creative person what they think it means, and immediately unstructure, randomness and perhaps some whimsy come to mind. If you ask a creative person, especially a prolific one, it’s probably the complete opposite. I’m going to take a balanced attempt at tackling this from the point of view of a creative person forced to be uncreative for a good chunk of my career, and who’s now finally spent about equal amounts of time doing both. So where does the truth really lie, what does ‘to be creative’ really mean, and why is any of it important?

Creative envelope

June 28, 2020 by Ming Thein

I’ve discussed the meaning of shooting envelope at length in the past. This is a practical, quantitative limit which effectively determines the conditions under which you can get an image of acceptable quality – usually, we apply it specifically to situations with one core constraint; either that the image must be made handheld, there are moving elements that have to be frozen, distance limits etc or something else. It applies indirectly to creative limits, too – if you want to make an image under certain creative (as opposed to physical) constraints, then one must seriously consider strengths and limitations of various possible bits of hardware. Put simply: I think of ‘creative envelope’ as the hardware’s ability to support the limits of my imagination. And this factor more than anything else has always been the underlying driver of purchasing decisions for me. I just realise I’ve never really explained it until today, undoubtedly leading to a lot of incorrect accusations of being a gear whore. What I intend to do today is explain the key factors that I consider for my own needs – yours may of course vary or change priority depending on what you prefer to shoot. I’ll also throw in a curveball: my best or most enabling purchase in each category to date.

Inspiration and creativity in times of crisis

April 23, 2020 by Ming Thein

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There is a cliched saying “necessity is the mother of invention” – I’ve always felt this to be only partially true. Reality is probably closer to being that solutions are found in times of desperation when there is no other choice, but this is only possible if some latent seed of imagination exists in the first place. Without that, no amount of need is going to force an intelligent answer or inspiration to materialise. This is true whether it’s something as vital as escaping from captivity or saving a business in time of crisis or finding something to cook for the evening with the ingredients to hand or even just staving off the boredom of being confined under COVID lockdown. I think it’s probably both easier and harder to survive this period for those of us wired to be creative – on one hand, we have a surfeit of time to sit down and get on with it without the usual interruptions or social expectations, but on the other we also have not just limited resources but limited inspiration. As we’ve discussed previously – creativity isn’t something that can be switched on and off at will, nor is it something that operates in a vacuum. At one end, you have the inclination, resources and inspiration and something gets produced, or you are missing any one of those elements and you feel frustrated. Or – lack inclination entirely. The bit that concerns us most in the current global situation is probably the inspiration part. But maybe it isn’t entirely hopeless…

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, creativity, crisis, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, photography, thein

Automation in photography: two sides of the fence

January 15, 2020 by Ming Thein

Over the last few years, I can’t help but feel a lot of the thinking has been shuffled higher up the chain – be it when driving or making images. Cameraphones probably epitomise this, especially the iPhone: photography has been simplified so thoroughly that actual parameters are completely removed from the equation, leaving ‘focus here’ and ‘brighter’ or ‘darker’. Everything else is decided by a series of logical algorithms that are aimed at one thing and one thing only: a ‘nice’ picture, acceptable in the opinions of the largest number of people. There are tradeoffs made that accommodate the needs of the widest possible market – which for the most part, isn’t the creative experimenter. Results are acceptable, punchy, and well, homogeneously bland in a sea of literally hundreds of millions of the same devices with the same limited control. Yes, some of that control is now coming back and some of the UIs are starting to show the strain of accommodating feature creep, negating the literal point-and-click simplicity that drew so many people to cameraphones in the first place (along with convenience and social media).

Choice, has been removed. Is it bad? Well, I’m honestly not sure and arguments in both directions follow – but would love to hear your opinions in the comments.

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, automation, creativity, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, thein

Creative anxiety

October 26, 2019 by Ming Thein

You’ve just spent a ton of money on a large, shiny new lens. The one youtube and the rumours sites have been on fire about for the last few months, proclaiming it better than caviar on truffle on foie gras. Gilded. You managed to actually get one in your hands, ahead of most of the mere hoi polloi. You found an ideal location by trawling instagram and looking at the number of amazing images that came out of that particular geotag. You booked a flight to the ends of the earth with a company specialising in adventure photography travel, endorsed by the gurus themselves. And just in case that wasn’t enough, there was a whole bunch of other ancillary support gear you had your eye on that you added – new SSDs, a kickass backpack that’s bulletproof, that compact tripod that folds to the size of a stick of gum but can hold an elephant, raised twenty million dollars on kickstarter in two minutes AND managed to save a schoolroom full of burning children whilst winning miss universe.

Yet when you step off the van into that sunrise…you can’t make a picture worth spit. Why?

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, creative anxiety, creativity, essay, ming, mingthein.com, opinion, photography, thein

Social media algorithms are limiting creativity and subliminally controlling your world view

June 7, 2019 by Ming Thein

First things first: there’s no image of any sort in this post, which is rare for me. It’s a silent protest against the fact that whether this link and thus its contents get disseminated to people who subscribe to my social media feeds (FB, IG, Twitter) and read or not is almost entirely down to some self-curating algorithms. The alarmist and provocative title are deliberate attempts to play the game (explained further on). It has nothing to do with whether you subscribed to my feeds or not. Only a small portion of the total population of posts or images published by people you follow actually shows up on your feed. This has been verified by several people and a simulation account I set up and subscribed to several sources; sure enough, at the start, you see a lot of posts from your ‘new friend’, but not long after – they virtually disappear. It isn’t because they haven’t been making content, it’s much more sinister than that.

Keeping photowalks fresh

December 27, 2018 by Robin Wong

I have led hundreds of photowalks within Kuala Lumpur and a few outside of the city and I have yet to tire of them. There have been official outings and workshops for local photography clubs or consumer events for camera manufacturers as well as private and solo outings over the years. I believe that a photowalk is essential for any photographer. If you are a professional photographer, commercial shoots may bring food to the table but personal photowalks are an opportunity fore creative experimentation and growth. For this article, I shall define photowalks as not strictly street photography per se, but a wider involvement of multiple disciplines in photography that may include city architecture, urban decay, street portraits, and any other genres with subject contents widely available at photowalk locations.

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Filed Under: Robin Wong Tagged With: avoiding boredom, creativity, mingthein.com, photowalks, robin, Robin Wong, wong

Creativity by the yard

April 16, 2018 by Ming Thein

The split

I’ve heard it said more than once that the world is divided into three kinds of people: those who create, those who support, and those who criticise. The former see the world differently and as a result land up being mostly societal misfits; at least until you become successful (which is nearly never, since the deck is stacked against you for reasons I will explain later). The corporate world wants to have the output and the commercial results, but is unprepared to support the infrastructure and requirements. The second group forms the majority of the population: ‘support’ can mean anything from consumption and patronage to supplier of key enablers such a services, environment or tools. And the latter – some serve as useful moderating reality checks and balances, but most just become bitter and jealous internet trolls. Today’s post is several things: an exploration of these roles, a series of suggestions from the point of view of a creative, and perhaps an apology (excuse?) for my wandering attention.

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Filed Under: Articles, Off topic, On Photography Tagged With: article, creativity, essay, medium, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, photography, thein

Creative integrity – or, the Struggling Artist Myth explained

January 10, 2018 by Ming Thein

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For the past six years, I’ve shot for pay full time, and occasionally for the better part of the preceding ten years before that. During the last six, the proportion of images of any sort shot with my own creative vision as primary motivation vs those shot with somebody else’s – i.e. for a client or as part of a commercial assignment – has swung from 100-0 to perhaps 5-95. This is expected, and both good and bad. It’s what actually had me stumped in my early pro days: every time I met a successful or established photographer, they almost never had a camera with them – or if they saw something spontaneous, they’d use their phone to shoot it. I wondered why, especially given their access to ‘better’. I think I know the answer to this, and to be honest: I’m not sure I or anybody else is going to like it. Read on if you dare.

Why the right hardware is liberating

February 26, 2017 by Ming Thein

It might actually be better to start off with the corollary: why the wrong gear is frustrating, or at best, obstructive. First principle: what’s good for you isn’t necessarily good for somebody else, and vice versa. This may seem obvious, but the number of people who are chasing and lusting after hardware that simply doesn’t make sense for them is quite mind boggling – the internet seems to be full of them. Of course, it’s highly likely that those who have found camera nirvana are simply out there making pictures and have stopped thinking about the whole gear train – it seems much more productive to me to spend time making pictures instead of scouring fora for obscure solutions and rumour sites hoping for magic bullets. It boils down to this: most people make different images. Considering this objectively, it means that for different objectives, different tools are required. Yet what I can’t understand is the obsession with finding a one-size-fits-all; the manufacturers want to do this because it makes economic sense, but the whole point of having choice is so we as consumers do not have to.