essay – Ming Thein | Photographer

How not to photograph an eclipse

December 28, 2019 by Ming Thein

It’s actually quite rare we get a) an eclipse visible from tropical latitudes and b) a solar one that happens during daytime. I personally have actually never seen an eclipse despite both trying and having some background training as an astrophysicist many moons ago; the last time was stymied by heavy cloud around sunset, and basically landed up indistinguishable from a normal sunset (albeit a few minutes earlier). So the event of the 26th of December was something I was rather looking forward to when I found out both a) and b) would be satisfied, and weather patterns of late have tended towards relatively clear days up to early afternoon. So how did it go?

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

Image licensing 101, redux

December 19, 2019 by Ming Thein

A recent correspondence with a debutant pro photographer prompted me to revisit the whole topic of intellectual property and licensing vs pricing: it was clear that he had no idea what he was getting himself into, assuming a job is a job with a fixed price and then handover of images. Whilst this is for the most part true and can be true even for extended commissions, it would be silly to leave revenue on the table and undermine the value of one’s own work. In short, if a client commissions work for a certain purpose but wishes to use it beyond at a later stage – you are within your rights to seek additional licensing fees but only providing you set that out clearly to begin with, and there is documented evidence of parties’ agreement. But before we discuss licensing, we should spend some time on the basics of intellectual property.

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Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: article, commercial, essay, image, licensing, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, onn, thein

Brave new world: the surprising iPhone 11 Pro

December 10, 2019 by Ming Thein

Field dispatch, Berlin, December 2019: I normally don’t write things on the road, both because I prefer to see where I’m going and because I find observations on anything need some sitting time; think of it as a curation of thoughts. But I’ve been slapped upside the head a little bit on this trip. Firstly, it isn’t a photographic one – it’s a spend-time-with-the-family one; even so, I’ve been paring down gear more and more of late to the point that a Nikon Z7 and two lenses is about the most I’ll do. In this case, the 24-70/4 S and the 85/1.8 S. Both are excellent but I find myself hardly using both the camera, and when I do, the 24-70 is left feeling lonely. Why? Well, I picked up the iPhone 11 Pro shortly before I left.

A massive (but silent) change

December 4, 2019 by Ming Thein

I’ve long been one of the strongest proponents of tripod use for the simple reason that doing so forces you to slow down. This slowing down has the combined benefits of making you spend more time observing your subject and its surroundings to increase awareness and in turn create a stronger or more interesting implied story; it forces you to spend more than a breath looking at the composition in the viewfinder and being aware of elements that might be imbalanced or distracting or intrusive, or that should be included. In fact, I almost always land up working off the rear LCD rather than the finder as it has the convenience of touch functions, the precision of live view focus, and tends to be larger*. So why is it that I actually haven’t used a tripod outside of macro and product work in the studio for over a year now?

*My preference still remains for an eye level finder when working quickly, though – both for immediacy and stability of having the camera braced against your face; arms’ length with an LCD is not stable and such situations usually don’t yield time for another try if you happened to shake. We have recently seen the jump from ‘good enough’ EVFs to very good EVFs that have improved resolution, color accuracy, black point and dynamic range enough to be quite transparent; once again with the benefit of focusing on the sensor as well as magnification for manual focus. I’d say we’re about on par at this point, at least in FF-land. But I digress.

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

A compact death

November 28, 2019 by Ming Thein

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In the last few years, our ‘serious’ compact (larger than tiny sensor) options have dwindled to just a small handful: the Ricoh GR, Canon GX, Panasonic TZ and LX, and the Sony RX100. I don’t know if the RX0 qualifies, but I suppose since it has a 1″ sensor – and anything else is thin on the ground. But that’s really about it – what used to be an abundance has now turned into a paucity. Even at the low end, other than all-weather mild-submersible things – it’s been quiet. I don’t think it’s entirely the fault of smartphones, either – because there are some capabilities unique to larger sensor compacts that mean there’s probably an opportunity here to a camera brand willing to take a small risk*. Here’s my thinking…

*That unfortunately probably means nobody, in the current market.

Where will all the photos go?

November 22, 2019 by Ming Thein

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Every day, billions upon billions of new images are made; one recent statistic put forth that there were more images made in the last year or two than the entirety of human history before that. It shows, too – in the early days of photography the bar for both content and technical quality was pretty low, given that it was amazing that there was an image at all; these days, there are so many repeats of ‘iconic’ images that they have become cliched and passé. Even though the rise of social media and broadband has enabled content to be consumed at a faster than ever rate, the math only goes one way: the rate of content being generated is increasing faster than the population, and the number of hours per day remains fixed – it is therefore easy to see that either less time is spent viewing a single image, or eventually people will get nothing done except scrolling instagram*. We already know the effect this has had on both the hardware market (positive, then saturated, then people get bored faster) and the professional market (terrible) – so the question I’d like to discuss today is a more fundamental one: what will happen to all of these images in the long term?

*Arguably, this is already happening.

The quest for tactility

November 16, 2019 by Ming Thein

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No, the header image isn’t meant to be some abstract representation of touch; it can’t be, since physiological visual and tactile pathways aren’t the same. However, it is a demonstration of why we prefer object or image A over B when they are both conceptually similar (for example: one person over another; one car over another; one meal over another), and I suspect also why some things trigger certain responses in certain people – and moreover, why we are driven to seek out certain qualities of things over others. Today’s post is the distillation of some self-examination over the last year or so – I think I understand my own personal motivations better; hopefully you might take away something, too.

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Filed Under: Off topic, On Photography Tagged With: article, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, photography, tactility, texture, thein

20 Stories, part V

November 13, 2019 by Ming Thein

Continued from Part IV

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Above and Beyond

I am used to having two kinds of clients: the first type tends to want things that have already been done before; they don’t want to take risks because previous photographers might have over promised and under delivered, or they lack the imagination to see something that hasn’t been done before. Or they simply are unwilling to pay for creativity over duplication. These are the kind of shoots that never go into your portfolio because it’s not the kind of work you want to be known for, but we pros have to do because they put food on the table and keep us in business; hopefully for long enough to get the chance to work on a project where we have full creative control and feel the pressure of our own limitations. It’s the kind of project where the client is willing to seriously consider your crazy ideas and trust your ability to deliver them.

My introduction to Koenigsegg came through Hasselblad and DJI. I suggested to Christian (von Koenigsegg) that we combine a bit of everybody’s technology: long exposures on a moving car to show dynamism and suggest a journey; high speed flash to freeze the car to make it distinct; very large prints and expansive compositions to fully use the camera’s resolution – and then top it off with an aerial perspective by putting the H6D on DJI’s largest aircraft. Execution would be tricky as there were a lot of moving pieces to coordinate and a very small window in which ambient daylight would be sufficient to see the surroundings, but not so much as to overpower the car’s lights. It would require a long exposure and a stable aerial platform. Honestly, I wasn’t 100% sure we could pull it off – and there was a backup documentary shoot within the factory to detail the construction process for the times of day where ambient light wasn’t suitable for the outdoor car sequences.

In the end, the shoot only produced five images – each one requiring a couple of hours of setup, test positioning for car, lighting and aircraft. We had to have a coordinator in touch with air traffic control and override codes from DJI HQ to allow us to fly as the Koenigsegg test track was on the edges of a live airfield. In the end I landed up triggering the lights manually with the trigger in one hand, a radio in my ear to direct the driver, and an ipad with the camera gimbal controls in the other – with the pilot next to me. The only time I’d had to do multitask more heavily was during another automotive shoot – a TV commercial where we added a crane car and crane operator to the mix.

I always feel mentally fried at the end of these shoots – but in the good kind of way where you know you’ve pushed your limits, the team’s limits, the hardware’s limits, and come out with something really unique. I’m just grateful there are still clients like this giving us photographers the chance to keep pushing.

20 Stories, part IV

November 10, 2019 by Ming Thein

Continued from Part III

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The 14th Century Jedi

I have a close friend who previously used to shoot for National Geographic in South Africa, but has since retired and just makes images for himself. Those tend to be the opposite to the very serious material he made professionally; as he says, he needs to have a means of decompressing at the end of what often turned out to be very dark or heavy assignments.

His personal work deliberately seeks out an element of irony or humour or whimsy; somehow, these compositions come naturally to him. I’ve tried to do the same myself, but somehow the elements don’t come together for me. Maybe it’s what one is conditioned or trained to see; maybe the laws of attraction manifest different things for different people.

I had just finished a session with my final student of the day and was walking back over the bridge to my hotel in the Old Town. I turned around to see if anything interesting was left behind – turns out I nearly missed a medieval Jedi statue doing a little gardening with his lightsaber. I like how this composition manages to blend my usual formalist structure (reducing scale elements towards the bottom of the frame, also increasing in brightness, darker, more open areas framing the outsides) but add that little surprise.

This frame always makes me think of that friend and the subconscious creative influences a photographer exerts over any and every person who has seen their work; we cannot un-see things. All creative work is derivative; it may just not be from near proximity or even the same field. But it would be extremely arrogant of us not to acknowledge the work of others who had gone before to allow us to shortcut the creative process and take things even further.

20 Stories, part III

November 7, 2019 by Ming Thein

Continued from Part II

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Land’s end, part I

It’s amazing how different two nearby cities in the same country can feel – take Lisbon and Porto, for instance. Both are in Portugal and on the Atlantic seaboard; both have old world charm, the beginnings of a renaissance and the visible effects of entropy. They are blessed with interesting architecture and the kind of topology that makes for both burning thigh muscles and interesting perspectives. The weather was great in both places when I was there. Yet whilst I instantly fell in love with Lisbon, I felt this underlying sense of unease and being haunted whilst in Porto. At the risk of simplification, Lisbon was happy, and Porto was sad – I don’t think I ever managed to figure out why, either.

On the last day I was there, a friend and I took a short ride out to a part of Porto on the coast called Foz do Douro. In summer, it’s known for its beaches; in winter, its spectacular waves. We were there sometime in between, and the sea was frothily moody, if not quite fully enraged.

There are times when vision just clicks and the frames compose themselves; in the two hours we spent at the start and end of the seawall, lighthouse and the places in between, I probably shot more frames than in the previous two days in Porto city proper. The light was dynamic and changing as fast as the sea conditions; the waves hinted at the power of the ocean and the other gathered to watch only put that even more clearly into context. Every frame held a different mood – dark and moody to ethereally backlit; this particular photograph freezes the sea in a position reminding the onlookers it is not to be trifled with, yet with the same onlookers in defiant poses suggesting the spirit of exploration. The water itself is frozen with texture and delicacy, in contrast to the scale of elements; I probably wouldn’t have blinked if a caravel came into view over the horizon, but lamented not bringing my 250mm.