ming thein – Ming Thein

FD Shooting with the legends: The Nikon F2 Titan

July 23, 2013 by Ming Thein

The F2 was introduced in 1971 off the back of the hugely successful F. Though external resemblances are similar, the camera was completely redesigned internally to improve reliability and ergonomics – firstly, the backs became hinged, and the shutter button moved forward to a more comfortable position at the front of the body and the wind stroke became shorter. The camera’s internal construction became modular, improving ease of repair. Batteries for powered finders migrated to a small cavity in the base of the body, with mirror lockup now standard. The titanium horizontal-travel FP curtains were improved and speeded up to offer 1/2000s and a 1/80s x-sync, up from 1/1000s and 1/60s in the F.

Film diaries: Shooting with the legends

July 21, 2013 by Ming Thein

Warning: what follows is an unashamed post about gear. Yes, Ming is writing a gear-centric post. There will be no photography in this article beyond the obligatory camera p***.

Imagine, for a moment, this is an automotive blog. In fact, the precise segment that comes to mind is Richard Hammond’s recent series in Top Gear on driving the classics; every month we see him wrestling his boyhood poster fantasies with a silly grin on his face. After re-reading that sentence, I realize that sounded very, very wrong. I can’t claim to be anywhere near as popular as Hammond or the rest of the Top Gear trio, nor does my enthusiasm for photography extend that far so far back as for me to have boyhood fantasies about it, but I do distinctly remember lusting after a lot of (then) out of reach gear in the early days of my obsession. I admit that one of the high points of this job has been having the opportunity to fulfill those desires. I may never get the opportunity to drive a BMW 3.0 CSL, let alone a 250 GTO SWB or a Bugatti Veyron Supersport, but a 903 SWC is still feasibly within reach…

What follows today’s article is a little mini-series; I wouldn’t really call them reviews, because the context is very different and they’re not really that relevant as current products.

Coming soon…

July 20, 2013 by Ming Thein

For those of you who would like to attend one of my workshops, but can’t for whatever reason – like me not being able to be everywhere, for instance 🙂 I’m please to share a little teaser of something coming very soon that will make a lot of people happy…

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Filed Under: Teaching Tagged With: ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, teaching, thein, video, video series, Workshop

July 2013 Singapore workshop report

July 19, 2013 by Ming Thein

This workshop very nearly turned into ‘how to shoot under atmospheric haze’ – but thankfully the airborne remnants of Indonesia’s forest-clearing lifted at the eleventh hour, and we enjoyed two days of spectacular weather. Even when rain threatened during lunch on the second day, the clouds miraculously lifted. Perhaps it was the collective power of 18 prospectively very angry and disappointed people that did it, or maybe the chicken I sacrificed before driving down. In any case, read on to see what we got up to.

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Filed Under: Teaching Tagged With: ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, singapore 2013, thein, Workshop

Film diaries: Nine months on

July 15, 2013 by Ming Thein

It’s now been a healthy chunk of time since I started shooting film again; enough to have a baby. What kind of child has this experiment turned out to be? Building on an earlier article of random thoughts and also from a digital perspective, I’ve had some more time to reflect on things now that a) my workflow has matured, and b) I think I’ve figured out where it fits in the grand scheme of things creatively for me. All I’m going to say is that the point I’m at now is very much not what I expected when I bought the F2 Titan in October last year.

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Filed Under: Articles, Film Diaries, On Photography Tagged With: article, eight months on, essay, film, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photography, thein

Photoessay: Small format Fukuokan monochromes

July 13, 2013 by Ming Thein

Most of these are square because I was under the influence of Hasselblad at the time; with your primary camera set up to shoot black and white squares, it’s difficult to break your shooting rhythm to see much of anything else. However, this set was shot entirely with a Leica(sonic) D Lux 6. I think what’s interesting here is when I used the DL6 over the ‘Blad: mainly in situations where a) I wouldn’t be fast enough with MF; b) when it was too dark and I didn’t have the 400 back already on the camera; c) when I needed longer or wider perspectives I didn’t have as most of the time I was only carrying 50 or 80mm lenses. There’s still very much room in the bag (pocket?) for a smaller format and a smaller camera, even if you have to give up image quality: a shot is better than no shot at all. Admittedly, at these sizes and this presentation format, it’s not easy to tell what camera was used. Regardless, it’s always about the images: enjoy! MT

The importance of printing, from a photographer’s standpoint

July 11, 2013 by Ming Thein

From the print session at the end of last year’s Making Light workshop – these were a bit of a revelation to the participants, most of whom had never made large prints before. And we were doing straight out of camera printing with no real postprocessing or optimization…

If all of you, dear readers, were sitting in a room, and I asked “How many of you print?” I think not every hand would be raised. “Regularly?” Even fewer. “Large?” Fewer still. And you’ve all proven yourselves to be a pretty exceptional bunch of people, if the comment threads are anything to go by. If anything, the average photographer – taking both amateurs and pros into consideration – these days prints very little, if at all. Yet a concern that seems to dominate a lot of photographers’ thoughts is over resolution; my question is why?

Choice, compromise and creativity

July 9, 2013 by Ming Thein

What do these two things have in common, other than they’re from (very, very loosely, give or take a decade) the same era?

European Workshops – last two places…

July 8, 2013 by Ming Thein

Amsterdam – 25-28 September: one four-day seat left; a couple of slots for individual days
Prague – 2-5 October: one four-day seat left; a couple of slots for individual days

The syllabus will still follow the core fundamentals from the USA tour: throw everything you thought you knew about photography out the window, and start again. All you need is a camera and a couple of perspectives – one wide, one tele. It could be either end of a zoom on a compact, or it could be medium format and a couple of primes – it’s up to you. What I’ll be teaching is subject independent: make great images, any time, with any subject, any camera. Put it this way: it’s easy to spend thousands on equipment that you may use a handful of times a year, but what about the knowledge that lets you make the most of that equipment, in any situation?

For full details and to make a booking, click here. Thanks! MT

Filed Under: Teaching Tagged With: amsterdam, europe 2013, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, munich, prague, teaching, thein, Workshop

Review: The Sigma DP3 Merrill

July 7, 2013 by Ming Thein

You’re probably wondering why this DP3M doesn’t look anything like the press release photos – my friend attached a RRS grip and plate to it, and rightly so; without it, the camera is not very comfortable to hold.

I eventually caved to both pressure and curiosity, and borrowed the Sigma DP3M from master printer and good friend Wesley Wong – who has the DP Merrill in all three flavors. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, Sigma has been going their own way with the DP series of large sensor compacts; all of their cameras now share the same 14.7 MP (effective) three-layered Foveon sensor, with a 4.99 micron pixel pitch and true color/ true resolution information across all photosites. In a nutshell, the difference between Foveon and Bayer sensors is that the former records actual RGB values for each pixel, but the latter only records R, G or B, interpolating the other values from neighboring photosites. It’s difficult to determine precisely just how much resolution loss Bayer interpolation causes, but in my experience it seems to be around 50% or so. Sigma claims that the camera has the equivalent of 46MP (being 15.3 total MP x3 layers) – but this is really pushing it; images upsampled this far simply do not have the pixel-level ‘bite’ of a good Bayer file.

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