future – Ming Thein | Photographer

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.

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.

Market challenges and predictions, late-2018 edition

October 10, 2018 by Ming Thein

Construction images, because, well, we’re building something here…

As with every industry, the cycle time for major changes is getting shorter and shorter for photography. I would argue that we’re now late into the second phase of digital (first phase: early digital at the cutting edge for pros, scientific applications etc.; second phase: consumer) and on the verge of the third phase. What does this mean in real terms? Why is the overall enthusiast photographic market softer? What remains to get excited about as a hobbyist? At the risk of inciting every troll between here and DPR, I break out the crystal ball…

Crystal ball gazing – have we reached a plateau?

June 24, 2018 by Ming Thein

The split, redux: all will be explained in the article…

In the late 90s/early 2000s, film photography arguably reached its zenith in many ways: you could get all sorts of hardware in all sorts of form factors; emulsion technology peaked in both proliferation and quality, and it was easy to get anything developed and printed, and developed well. There were high end pro compacts, super fast DSLRs, consumer megazooms, large format folders, sub-frame cameras…films varying in speed, look, positive/negative, and even crossover-types like C41 process black and white. I’d even argue that since then, film emulsions have not really improved (undoubtedly due to the vanishingly poor business proposition created by the emergence of digital) – and we’ve lost most of the major manufacturers and choices. (To say nothing of the labs.) The core technology reached a balanced plateau: lenses were matching emulsions in resolving power; AF systems were matching the rest of the system in precision required to consistently deliver the aforementioned resolution. On film, there’s not much difference between one of the better 50mms of the time (say a C/Y 1.7/50 MM, A Leica 50/2 Summicron, or a ZF.2 2/50 Makro-Planar) and arguably the best of today – the Zeiss 1.4/55 Otus APO-Distagon. I tried this experiment on an F6 some time back, with Fuji Acros: I couldn’t really see much of a difference in resolving power. Drawing style, yes, but not resolving power. Your ability to focus made far more of a difference. And running the same film through my 1979 F2 Titan or the 2005 F6 made no difference at all, of course. Ultimately, during the film era: image quality was proportional to format size. How is this relevant to now?

Crystal ball gazing: Predicting the photographic ecosystem in 10 years, part II

June 19, 2017 by Ming Thein

That impending sense of something looming just out of view…

Today’s article continues from Part I in the previous post: where will photography land up in the next ten years?

Convergence, equivalence and the future of sensors

February 2, 2017 by Ming Thein

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Image credit: Cnet

I’m sure you’ve all seen this Sony sensor size comparison chart at various fairs, on various sites, or in the simulated display (in which no sensors were harmed in the making of) at their various retail outlets. The implication, of course, is that bigger is better; look how much bigger a sensor you can get from us! This is of course true: all other things being equal, the more light you can collect, the more information is recorded, and the better the image you’ll be able to output for a given field of view. However, I’m going to make a few predictions today about the way future digital sensor development is going to go – and with it, the development of the camera itself. Revisit this page in about five years; in the meantime, go back to making images after reading…

2017 crystal-ball gazing

January 1, 2017 by Ming Thein

Sorry, didn’t have a crystal ball handy…

I said at the start of 2016 that the overall market for photographic services (commissioned work, art, education) was getting lumpier and smaller: I don’t think that’s changed. If anything, it’s gotten worse. I suspect this is an underlying societal change more than anything: people are simply getting bored. So where does that leave us in 2017?

Digital resolution: why enough will probably never be enough, and how to solve it

June 26, 2016 by Ming Thein

How often do we have nice regular subjects like this? Hardly ever.

The pixel race continues: more resolving power is being crammed into smaller and smaller physical sizes. The recent Hasselblad X1D announcement is at the pointy end of that: we now have medium format resolving power and tonal quality in a package that’s smaller than many 35mm solutions. I have a theory about resolution and the megapixel race and perception. Aside from the marketing reasons why 100>50>24 and must therefore be better, there are much more fundamental reasons why we feel the resolving power limitations of digital far more acutely than film. And it isn’t just our ability to pixel-peep with ease; it’s more to do with the fundamental nature of the world. Yes, there’s sufficiency in output because of the limitations of the output device itself, but I suspect these will catch up and exceed capture very easily. Allow me to explain why, and why I think there’s a way out that might well result in a very different sort of sensor…

Digital posterity: will your images survive you?

September 3, 2014 by Ming Thein

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An old family photograph: the young man in the center is my grandfather; he passed away 22 years ago in 1992.

Back story: my grandmother’s passing last year and sorting of her effects unearthed a number of photographs from a much earlier era; my guess is the mid 1950s; that’s the better part of 65 years ago. There weren’t that many – about 10 in all. Ostensibly being the authority on all things photographic in the family, they were passed to me for restoration. Combined with a recent SSD failure on my primary machine, it got me thinking on a subject beyond backups: how can we ensure our images survive us? Do we even want them to?