ming thein – Ming Thein

Photoessay: Slanted

November 25, 2019 by Ming Thein

A series of rises and falls today; topology and mountaineering in urban shadow. An energetic, driving baseline as opposed to something more melodic; think EDM over Mozart (not that I listen to either, to be honest). The beat links the frames together across subject and scale, with occasional visual riffs and explorations of a motif but sticking with this same theme. I’ve probably said this somewhere before, but photography (and any visual art) have always been like music to me; a landscape of texture focused one of our senses. Crucially, both have limitations – music is temporal and one-way only; photography has only two dimensions. But both also have the ability to effect a presentation that transcends the limitations of reality by encouraging us to suspend disbelief and just appreciate what’s put in front of us; we can only see what we are shown. MT

This set was mostly shot with a Nikon D3500, 18-55 kit and SOOC JPEG, with a guest appearance from the Z7 and Pen-F.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: abstract, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, monochrome, photoessay, photography, slanted, thein

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.

Photoessay: Nostalgia

November 19, 2019 by Ming Thein

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I recently met up with some classmates from nearly 20 years ago (boy, does that make me feel prematurely superannuated), which got me digging around in the archive on my return home. Whilst the earliest roots of my interest in photography started at university, I didn’t really do much serious shooting until the year after – there simply wasn’t the funds or time. I am reminded that the underlying purpose of most images is memory; be it of people, events, ideas, or something else; and that memory is often dynamic with time. Emotions tend to skew things towards extremes, and photos can either be a normalising factor or an emotionally enhancing one. In the browsing I did come across images that were both; all were universally of zero photographic merit and a lot of it was honestly dingier than I remember. But looking a little later – a couple of years – yielded a very thin set (this set) that was a bit more in line with what I want to remember. No doubt I’d make something quite different if I was back there again shooting today. When it comes to remembering photographs, the digital archive doesn’t change or fade, so it can only be our memory that’s playing us for a fool. MT

Shot with a mixed bag of stuff from a long time ago.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, nostalgia, oxford, photoessay, photography, thein

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

Photoessay: Quotidian for some

October 29, 2019 by Ming Thein

Where I live, making images that are vignetted observations of life in the style presented today is very difficult for one simple reason: people tend not to walk much or use public transport; the former because it’s just too damn hot and society still expects you to wear a suit (and as a consequence, the whole city isn’t very pedestrian friendly in the first place), and the latter because it doesn’t really exist outside of a small network. You land up with a lot of cars and not much human interaction – and thus nothing much to photograph. It’s for this reason that whenever I travel to a place where there’s a lot of human life at street level – I tend to gorge myself photographically and amass a lot of material in a very short space of time. This reptilian approach to photography is not intentional but simply a consequence of circumstance. It does also have the happy coincidence of forcing one to break creative anxiety – every situation is constant reminder that your expectations are probably invalid, and to always be open to serendipity. MT

This series was shot with a Nikon Z7 and 24-70/4 S, with my custom SOOC camera JPEG picture controls available here.

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Filed Under: On Photography, Uncategorized Tagged With: japan, life, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, monochrome, people, photoessay, photography, street, thein, tokyo

Photoessay: Alpine

October 23, 2019 by Ming Thein

Earlier in the year, I made a family trip to Japan – Tokyo (of course, images to follow) and Hakuba – site of the Winter Olympics in 1998. As it turns out, torn discs aren’t that much of an impediment to skiing since if you’re as out of practice as I am, most of the work is done by your thighs and knees; in the end I managed only two days before I gave up and decided to make the most of the one clear-ish day we had for some landscape photography. Even so, it had to be squeezed in between parental and spousal duties, so opportunities were somewhat limited; as it turns out the light didn’t last that long, anyway. All of my previous alpine photography experiences have been on bare mountains; it’s quite different to have the varied textures of different trees to work with, and the subtle gradations as the clouds shifted and shadow patterns across the hills changed. I deliberately left in the large color temperature differences between direct/reflected sun and snow/ ice in shadow; it seems the ice attenuates certain wavelengths to emphasise the cool shadows. Hopefully some of that delicacy is translated here. MT

Images were shot with a Nikon Z7, almost entirely the 70-200/4 with 1.7x TC, and post processed with Photoshop Workflow III and the Z7 Profile Pack.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: alpine, hakuba, japan, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, nikon, photoessay, photography, thein

At the risk of losing your customers…

October 20, 2019 by Ming Thein

Build it and they will come…for a while, and then it becomes an antiquated and cancerous white elephant. First published in the May issue of Medium Format Magazine.

Advance doom and gloom warning: If the photographic industry continues in its current trends (turning spec sheets up to 11; increasing launch prices then decreasing them dramatically over a product’s lifecycle; being inconsistent/imbalanced with design intent – tiny bodies, enormous lenses; ever shrinking ‘incremental’ improvements between generations; poorly implemented software UI/UX; launching of what is basically beta hardware; influencers who produce rubbish images but have large numbers of “followers” “likes” etc.) – expect to see some serious contraction and consolidation soon. In fact, the hard financial numbers suggest this has already begun. The reasons why are not rocket science, but pretty much every company is acting like a paralysed ostrich hoping that if they continue as they have been and pretend it’s all okay, it will be. It won’t, and the ones who survive are going to need to find some cojones.

Photoessay: Alien geometry

October 17, 2019 by Ming Thein

Every time an architect tries a postmodern, hypermodern, pseudo-alien interpretation of something – I can’t help but think that the opposite is true. By intentionally shedding societal convention and expectation of what a building or space should be, and given a sufficiently liberal client – all that’s left are the limits of the designer’s imagination*. And unless the designer isn’t of this planet – what remains is if anything about as human as things get. I do realise this sounds somewhat unintuitive at best, and downright hypocritical at worst; but ask yourself this: for something to be truly alien it has to be foreign to you. And if it was created by humans – as all buildings on Earth are – it’s still within the realm of our understanding and appreciation. Different, yes; completely alien, no. Somewhat related segue: not having the dictat and expectations of history is not a bad thing at all when it comes to design; I don’t think I’d be able to create a watch to a company expectation or style, for instance. To the creators of the buildings – I applaud the clients for not saying no (or for insisting son something different) and for the architects and contractors to pulling it off. MT

This series was shot some time ago with mostly the Olympus Pen F and various lenses, mostly SOOC camera JPEG. Some Nikon Z7/ 24-70 thrown in for good measure, too.

*And structural engineers’ ability to execute. I respect/ pity those who work for Gehry, Hadid etc.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: abstract, alien, architecture, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photoessay, photography, thein

Stream of consciousness

October 14, 2019 by Ming Thein

Thoughts, truths and insights from the years presented in no particular order…

Photoessay: Repetition in high key

October 11, 2019 by Ming Thein

Perhaps repetition is the wrong word; riffs on a theme might be more apt. Pay close attention to the sequencing of the images and you’ll notice the key lines flow up down along diagonals that provide continuity between frames; in this way the repetition and structure extends beyond the individual image to the entire set. The tonal bias is mostly high key and cool, but even then there are slight variations to hint at different moods*. I think of it almost as a rising and falling of music that smoothly transitions between passages. Still, the outer covering merely disguises the fact that the underlying structures themselves are the usual rectangular blocks; it’s simply not economical to make something that isn’t regular (not to mention producing spaces that are highly inefficient). These are after all public buildings in the administrative centre of the country; a little decorative facade cladding is fine, but let’s not go too far overboard. MT

*I’m very pleased with the tonality from this series; there’s something about the light openness of the mid and highlight tones that I’ve only been able to achieve with medium format up to this point – but it might also be because I’ve had a strong preference for darker, richer tones. Think oil painting vs watercolour.

This series was shot with a Nikon D3500 and AF-P 70-300 DX VR, and is a mix of SOOC JPEG and edited raw using Photoshop Workflow III.