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…
July 2013 Singapore workshop report
July 19, 2013 by
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.
Photoessay: KLCC abstracts in monochrome
July 17, 2013 by
Half of perhaps the most iconic building in Malaysia.
Rather frustratingly, I’d actually typed out a long history about KLCC, but WordPress ate it and it’s nowhere to be found. Here we go again…
The Petronas Twin Towers – 88 stories, and part of the greater KLCC complex (including a park, two hotels, conventionn center, mall, mosque and another two office blocks) – put Malaysia on the map for megaprojects. Opened in 1998, the towers were designed by Cesar Pelli and completed by competing Korean and Japanese firms. It was paid for entirely by petroleum revenues from the eponymous national oil company; during the Asian Financial Crisis, occupancy was low – again with the exception of the name tenant – these days, things are back to normal and space is at a hideous premium, even on an international level. Architecturally, the site is challenging as it’s a former racecourse with very little bedrock and a lot of clay and porous limestone; this is the main reason for putting the taller, heavier structures around the periphery. Even so, extensive piling and foundation works had to be done, and many of the lower basement levels underneath the main towers are filled with concrete to settle the ground and form a floating slab on which some of the other outlying structures sit.
Film diaries: Nine months on
July 15, 2013 by
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.
Photoessay: Small format Fukuokan monochromes
July 13, 2013 by
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
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
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
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
Review: The Sigma DP3 Merrill
July 7, 2013 by
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.
Photoessay: A few trees
July 5, 2013 by
I thought I’d do something different with today’s photoessay: it’s a collection of images spanning a wide period in my career, but of a single subject. For a landscape photographer, trees, clouds, terrain, water, weather etc. are all staple building blocks of a complete image; for an obsessive photographer, each individual element can yield manifold variations. (Clouds are my other real obsession, but I think I’m going to need more than one photoessay to do those justice.) It’s an interesting idea I’d like to explore further both in future photoessays and opinion pieces. Enjoy! MT
Images shot with a variety of equipment at various times; the different vintages of watermark are the giveaway here.
Kuala Lumpur
