mingthein.com – Ming Thein

Color management for photographers: a primer

October 17, 2012 by Ming Thein

Color spaces, from Wikimedia Commons; reused under a Creative Commons license. Image by Cpesacreta. What is clear here is that none of the common color spaces or reproduction methods can display the entire visible spectrum.

Starting from the start, a colour space defines all of the possible tones and hues that a single pixel may take. The values may take either a RGB value or CMYK value; the set of three numbers represents the amount of each colour present from a scale of 0-255, which gives 256 possible tonal values for each colour (red, green, blue or cyan, magenta, yellow and black). Combining every possible permutation of these gives you 16.7 million possible different colours for RGB. Note that you don’t get 4.3 billion colours for CMYK, because the K (black) value controls the overall brightness and density rather than contributing another possible hue to the mix.

The reason why we have different colour spaces is because they define the limit of reproducible tones for a particular reproduction method – be that screen, web, print, or TV transmission. The most commonly used colour spaces are either a type of sRGB or newsprint CMYK; both of these actually offer very limited reproduction potential. Many of you will notice that most images you see on the web, or in print, are lacking in depth and tonal subtlety; this is simply because the desired tone simply cannot be reproduced, and as a result lands up defaulting to the nearest possible colour value – which is obviously not going to accurately represent the original image. When a colour goes outside the possible range, this is known as gamut clipping. Some of the better proofing software can be configured to display a warning when this occurs; Camera Raw shows a small warning triangle in the upper-right near the histogram.

For photographers, the important colour spaces you need to be aware of for digital display are Adobe RGB, sRGB and ProPhoto RGB. For print, it’s whatever variant of CMYK your printer uses. Let’s start with the former. Adobe RGB is the most common wide-gamut colour space available; almost every camera today – even compacts – has the option to output in this colour space by default – use it. sRGB is a limited, mostly web-safe gamut that varies slightly depending on the standard; one camera maker’s sRGB won’t be the same as another, and the sRGB displayed online will be different yet again – possibly depending on the browser, or your system settings, or any one of many other factors. Avoid this wherever possible. The final RGB – ProPhoto – provides the widest of all gamuts; however, most monitors aren’t capable of displaying the majority of the possible colours, and few web browsers support it. I’m going to leave covering CMYK until the section dealing with print.

Although the tonal limitations of each colour space depend very much on the specific colour space themselves, it’s safe to say that in general, you’ll see the difference between Adobe RGB and sRGB most prominently in the blues and greens. There’s a particular shade of sky blue that seems to be nearly impossible to reproduce in sRGB, for instance. CMYK has similar restrictions to sRGB, but biases towards cyan instead of green and blue; overall, it lacks the vibrance and saturation that RGB can deliver – unsurprising given that the constituent colours are not red, green and blue! CMYK is used only for print proofing and is never found in camera or monitor; this is because the native components of these devices are formed of RGB photosites or pixels.

The observant of you will have noted that 256 tonal values represent 8 bits of information per colour channel. So why do we bother with 14 bit raw files, and working in 16 bits? Simple: although our output may always only be 8-bit, the amount of information we have going in affects the amount of work we can do to a file before we start to see posterisation (separation of areas into distinct blocks of colour with no tonal variation or smooth transition between adjacent zones). If we have 256 input values, do some contrast adjustment (effectively, ‘stretching’ the histogram) – we might now make some of the levels cover adjacent levels, resulting in only say 150 truly distinct tonal values for a particular channel. Most of the time, software will cover these ‘steps’ reasonably well; however, the reality is that you will see some posterisation. Working in a 16-bit colour space – with 65,536 tonal values per channel – avoids this problem mainly because we can’t actually achieve this many distinct tonal values through most reproduction methods; everything is effectively down sampled before output. Make sure you have your editing software convert any files in other colour spaces to the working colour space, too.

In-camera, the best option you have for maintaining accurate colour is to shoot RAW, Adobe RGB and whatever the highest bit space your camera offers; for the current batch of Nikons that would be 14-bit NEF, Adobe RGB, lossless compressed or uncompressed. (Lossless compressed only discards information in portions of the tonal register that aren’t being used or are adjacent duplicates, not any of the actual image data). Any time you’re shooting JPEG, you’re limited to 8 bits – and every file is compressed; avoid shooting JPEG unless you absolutely have no choice (A non-compressed JPEG is effectively a TIFF or bitmap). After being used to the tonal elasticity of of manipulating a good RAW file, you’ll be surprised at just how fast a JPEG will clip or posterise when manipulated – it’s one of the reasons that I almost always avoid buying a camera until there’s full RAW support for it through my usual workflow (ACR>PS). And it’s also important to note that RGB channel histograms and overexposure warnings are important: once a channel clips, it’s gone for good, especially with JPEG files. Although most raw converters will allow for some interpolation of surrounding tonal information to recover and reconstruct some highlight data, it won’t be that accurate.

All of this care during capture would be useless if not maintained during the postproduction process – that’s the importance of your screen workflow. Firstly, you need to have a good monitor that’s capable of displaying a wide gamut; the best of today’s bunch (Eizo, some NEC, Apple Cinema Display) are capable of covering almost all of the Adobe RGB gamut; if you’re serious, this is the kind of monitor you want. Secondly, it needs to be calibrated – i.e. ensuring what you see on screen accurately represents the actual data. The Monitor Calibration Utility for Apple (under System Preferences, Displays) is actually pretty good at this if you do all of the steps properly – a handy tip is to have an image which you’re familiar with open in another window while you run the wizard to ensure that the end output looks accurate to you. For Windows users, you’re recommended to invest in a Spyder or something similar – this generates a profile that the monitor then uses create its display output.

The next step along the chain is output: what are you going to use the image for? If it’s print, save as a 16 bit uncompressed TIFF; this will give the printer as much information as possible to work with when performing the RGB to CMYK conversion. I don’t actually recommend performing this conversion yourself unless you have the exact colour profile your printer is going to use, otherwise you might land up with some strange hue shifts. If it’s for screen or web use, then a jpeg is fine – most viewers are not going to have the right equipment to view the full gamut anyway; thus it’s better that you run a test proof under as close to actual viewing conditions as possible. I wouldn’t advocate going to sRGB unless you know that’s the only possible output; your best choices these days are Safari and Firefox – both are available for Windows and Mac. Similarly, ensure that your web hosting service preserves as much of the colour information as possible; the only one I know of that doesn’t convert things to sRGB is Flickr. Facebook et al are absolutely horrible – not only do they compress the hell out of the image, but they also shift everything into a very restricted web-safe sRGB that makes things appear both tonally blocky yet ‘coarse’ at the same time, due to the compression. Do NOT use Facebook to display images unless you have no choice, don’t care, or didn’t have the tonal information to begin with (smartphones, for instance) – everything just looks bad.

Printing is a whole article unto itself, but I’m going to touch on it briefly here: the main disconnect between the print workflow and the capture workflow is colour space; screen viewing involves an additive method where R, G and B are mixed together to make the desired colour; print uses C, M, Y and K inks subtractively to create colour. The reason for this is simple: pixels are backlit, prints aren’t. You’re dealing with reflected light off the print medium as opposed to transmitted light. Although this conversion process keeps improving, the mapping isn’t perfect and there still remain portions of the Adobe RGB gamut that can’t easily be reproduced in print. Part of this is due to the subtractive method; part of it is due to the fact that ink drops are either there or they aren’t – to create the illusion of tonal variation, printers use very, very small drops and dithering or half toning to leave white space between the dots. Note that print DPI is not the same as screen DPI – one pixel may be represented by anywhere up to 12 dots of ink! By far the best option for printing is to ensure your RGB output file is as accurate and full of information as you can manage; then find yourself a competent printer. I’m not going to get into self-printing – suffice to say that I did try, but between the wasted test prints, the clogged heads, the cleaning cycles…it simply wasn’t economically feasible for me to maintain my own printer.

There’s one final thing you have to take into consideration when an output image is being viewed: the effect of ambient light. It’s less important for devices that supply their own light – LCD panels, for instance – but it still matters because ambient brightness might overwhelm the panel and make colours appear dull or washed out. It’s far more critical for print viewing; the colour temperature of ambient light will affect the perceived white point, as well as the light reflected off the print itself. This causes toning or shading of the print; a good print master will adjust the yellow and blue components of an image for the intended display location; for instance, under tungsten light you have to remove some yellow component and/or increase the blues slightly as the light itself will provide that; the opposite is true for LED lighting. This is why all critical print proofing should be done in daylight – or under a daylight (5500-6000K) source. There are special daylight spectrum fluorescent tubes available for this purpose.

You’ll notice that I haven’t said anything about black and white workflow – it still matters, though less so. Assuming your printer can create a pure black and white without any hue shifts, then the important part is to check your grayscale space – this works in a similar manner to colour spaces, but controls the gamma of the image rather than the actual range of possible tonal values. This is critical to ensure that the resulting output image has the right density.

I’m going to finish with a final note on my own workflow. I run a 15″ MacBook Pro, calibrated with the Monitor Calibration Utility. I shoot 14-bit lossless compressed RAW in Adobe RGB on my D800E, M9 and OM-D; the RX100 is JPEG-only for the moment (Update: now supported by ACR/ LR as at October 2012). Files are opened in Adobe Camera Raw for initial adjustments (even JPEGs) before conversion to the working file format in Photoshop; I keep everything in 16 bit Adobe RGB until output. My web output is 8-bit JPEG; everything else is 16-bit lossless compressed (LZW) TIFF, or Photoshop (depending on the use or client). I will do some CMYK conversions for clients if they can supply the working CMYK space; otherwise, if it’s print, I leave the conversion to my printer – he knows the output capabilities of his equipment far better than I do, and I’ve yet to be disappointed with any of his output. It’s important to note that although I’ll select the colour space that retains as much of the original tonal information as possible, there’s also no point in bloating files if the information simply wasn’t there to begin with in the first place; I’m not going to save a conversion from a 12-bit RAW file as a 16-bit TIFF because there simply isn’t that much information after manipulation; let alone a JPEG. These will be saved as 8-bit compressed TIFF files instead.

Although the colour management process can be daunting, it’s important to invest time in understanding it and get it right – you’ll find afterwards that your images look a lot more consistent, regardless of the display medium. MT

____________

Visit our Teaching Store to up your photographic game – including Photoshop Workflow DVDs and customized Email School of Photography; or go mobile with the Photography Compendium for iPad. You can also get your gear from B&H and Amazon. Prices are the same as normal, however a small portion of your purchase value is referred back to me. Thanks!

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the reader Flickr group!

Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: cmyk, color, color management, color spaces, gamut, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, rgb, thein

Quick review: The Olympus 15/8 Body Cap Lens

October 15, 2012 by Ming Thein

At left: body cap. At right: Lens. Not much difference.

Lens mounted on the E-LM5.

Disclaimer: if you came here looking for optical perfection, you should probably stop reading now.

On the other hand, if you came here because you were curious about this little pancake, then read on. I admit that although I’m usually squarely in the former category, for some odd reason, the 15/8 got me intrigued – I suppose it was the size, or the fact that it suits the whole ‘fun’ ethos of the smaller PEN cameras. I think it’s the photojournalist in me that very much likes the idea of having the camera ready to go at all times, even if it’s in storage; the Olympus BCL-15 lets you do just that. It’s effectively the same depth as the supplied standard body cap (maybe a millimetre or two thicker, but nobody’s counting) – making the smaller bodies like the E-PL5 and E-PM1 very pocketable indeed. The lens was launched together with a number of other items at Photokina 2012 – notably the E-PL5, E-PM1 Pens, 60/2.8 Macro and the wireless SD card system.

The mosque by the sea. E-PL5, 15/8

100% crops.

It isn’t anything special in terms of construction: the lens has just three elements (supposedly glass), all-plastic construction, and a clever little lever that both doubles as a shutter to protect the front element, as well as a focusing lever; on the subject of focusing, you can get as close as 30cm to your subject. The lever is light and doesn’t really stay in place if bumped, but then again, precision isn’t that important in a lens that both has an extremely great depth of field – being a 15mm f8 and all – and optics that aren’t exactly highly-corrected. In fact, it’s a wonder that it isn’t just fix-focused.

Book spirals. E-PL5, 15/8

100% crops.

Needless to say, there’s no electronic communication of any sort between camera and lens, so EXIF data is not recorded, and since there’s only one aperture, you’ve effectively got a point and shoot. Curiously though, it appears Olympus has put a small baffle between two of the elements to only use the central portion of the lens in a bid to keep image quality reasonably high; I suspect that if one could somehow separate the elements and remove this, you’d find the lens to be closer to f4 or thereabouts – at the expense of optical quality and depth of field, of course. It might be something I’d be willing to try as a rainy day project…

Staircase. E-PL5, 15/8

100% crops.

So how does it perform optically? Well, it’s surprisingly sharp in the center, even though the 16MP M4/3 sensors are already hitting diffraction limits at f5.6 and smaller; the lens might well be a bit sharper if it was a stop faster due to this. The edges and corners are another story – let’s just say they’re not very sharp anywhere, and rather smeary in places. No doubt this is due to the limited optical correction possible with just three non-aspherical elements. (That said, this lens reminds me of the MS-Optical Perar Triplet 35/3.5 and 28/4 lenses for the Leica M mount; I wonder how they perform optically.) So long as you keep your subjects in the central third or so of the the frame, and take a little time to ensure focus is just about at the right distance, optical results are better than expected.

Although you might think that some of the crops are soft because of the focus distance, let me assure you that at f8 and a 15mm real focal length, the depth of field is more than sufficient to cover where I placed the focal point – and that was verified with live view magnificaiton for the purposes of this test; in real life, I don’t think I’d bother.

Minaret. E-PL5, 15/8

100% crops.

Simple lens designs like this one tend to have very high contrast and transmission because there aren’t a lot of surfaces and air-glass interfaces inside the lens to lose light at; the 15/8 renders with very high macrocontrast indeed; microcontrast is much less impressive, though (and has a lot to do with resolving power – you weren’t surprised about that result, were you?). Color is saturated, brilliant and actually quite pleasing.

Sunset. E-PL5, 15/8

I can see photographers buying this for several reasons – as a fun walk around lens; as an impulse buy when you go to the camera shop with itchy fingers but perhaps not enough money or not finding anything that really catches your eye; the blogging crowd will probably find it fun and conveniently compact. I actually used it a lot while reviewing the E-PL5 (which all of these images were shot on) simply because it made the camera very pocketable and immediately responsive – not having AF and all – and being very close to my preferred 28mm focal length, an interesting street photography option (at least in good light; f8 means that you’re hitting ISO 3200 even in the shade, and forget about using it indoors).

Amusement park dusk. E-PL5, 15/8

Conclusion: At just US$60, it’s a no-brainer recommendation for anybody who owns a M4/3 camera, especially if you’ve got a older or spare one lying around. Mine now lives on my E-PM1 Pen Mini, which has seen little use since the OM-D and Sony RX100 entered the stable. put this on, stick the camera in your pocket, and go for a walk. You’ll be glad you did. MT

The Olympus BCL-15mm f8 Body Cap lens is available here from B&H or Amazon.

____________

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the reader Flickr group!

Abandoned, I. E-PL5, 15/8

Filed Under: Gearhead: Reviews Tagged With: 15/8, 15/8 body cap lens, gearhead, micro 4/3, micro four thirds, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, olympus, review, thein

Simple explanations of important camera functions/ settings/ parameters

October 13, 2012 by Ming Thein

A recent email from a beginner/ amateur user on which camera settings to use under what conditions provided the motivation for this post. In addition to there never being a one-size-fits-all answer, it occurred to me that the reason why a lot of users are confused is partially down to poor product and UI design on the part of the camera companies, and overambition on the part of the user.

Cameras tend to come in one of two flavors: firstly, fully automated, dumbing down, hiding or completely eliminating all photographic functions/ controls or obfuscating them to the user behind language or parameters that doesn’t necessarily make sense intuitively, such as ‘blur control’. The second type of camera lets it all hang out: it’s so manually intimidating and complex, offering control over everything from critical exposure functions to the color of the LCD backlight or number of images taken when using the self timer, and at what interval – that the new or even slightly unfamiliar user has no idea where to begin. And to compound things, camera makers often make inexplicably baffling changes to the UI between each generation – for instance, the +/- indicators on the exposure compensation scale for the D700/D3 generation runs in the opposite direction to the D800/D4. Why? Nobody knows. Maybe the person designing the silk screen stencil for the top panel LCD didn’t refer to the previous model, or think that there might be photographers out there still using both generations of camera. (Sure, you can make the rotation direction of the dials match, but it doesn’t help the fact that either way, one of the cameras is going to have the display move in an unintuitive direction in use – which may slow you down enough to miss a shot, or you ignore it and land up drastically over- or under- exposed.)

Human nature forms the other barrier: whilst most of us have a decent idea of the limits of their own ability, we might not be so willing to admit it to others. And like it or not, in today’s consumer society, the size and complexity of your camera is a subtle, or perhaps not-so-subtle, telegraph to the rest of the world about both your spending power and your photographic prowess. (Of course, whether either is accurate or not is a completely different topic.) It seems to be especially true where I live, where you see almost everybody carrying a DSLR – yet using it in the green mode and looking surprised when the flash pops up by itself. The upshot of this is that almost every consumer will buy more camera than they need, either convinced by the marketing mantra of ‘more better’, the smooth-talking salesperson, wanting to outdo their friends, or thinking they can ‘grow into it’.

A casual survey of my non-serious-photographer friends reveals that most of them don’t know how to do anything more than turn the camera on, zoom, press the shutter to take a picture; and perhaps turn the flash on and off. It also makes me wonder why ‘simple’ compacts are still so darn complicated to operate. The disconnect is that there are also a good number of them using prosumer DSLRs – think D7000s or 60Ds and the like. It’s both a shame for them that due to the intimidating nature of the cameras, they may never progress any further; yet be frustrated that the camera doesn’t behave quite as expected. Why is the shot dark? Why is it always focusing on the background? Etc.

Important photographic controls boil down to two things: one set that controls the look of the image, and one set that controls the behaviour of the camera.

Image parameters, in order of importance

Focal length – The perspective and field of view of your frame. Note that this comes before all other considerations, because if you misuse your perspective or select the wrong field of view for a given subject, then no matter how technically perfect the image, it won’t save you from poor composition.

Aperture – The size of the lens opening; controls both the amount of light entering the camera, as well as the depth of field or the range that is in focus. Smaller f-numbers indicate a larger opening, which equals more light and higher shutter speeds, but also shallower depth of field. Isolate subjects with out-of-focus backgrounds by using a larger aperture. Using a small aperture in low light will yield insufficient shutter speed to produce a sharp image unless you’re using a tripod or very high ISO.

Shutter speed – The amount of time for which the shutter stays open. The longer this duration, the higher the chance of you, or the subject moving, and subsequently producing a blurred image. This can be desirable if there are clearly static elements in the scene to serve as a visual anchor point, such as rocks and blurred water, etc. The faster the subject, the higher the shutter speed you need to freeze its motion. To handhold a reasonably high-resolution camera safely and produce an image that is crisp at the 100% actual-pixel level (assuming the subject is in focus), you need 1/[focal length in 35mm equivalent]s, or half that (1/2x) to be safe.

Sensitivity/ ISO – The ‘gain’ or amplification on the signal from the sensor. Doubling the ISO doubles the gain, which in turn doubles the shutter speed. However, you’re also doubling both the information part of the signal as well as the noise, so every increase in ISO necessarily comes with an associated penalty in image noise. However, most cameras have a decent usable range that makes it possible to set auto-ISO within this range, and let the camera automatically boost sensitivity when the shutter speed falls below the set threshold (usually 1/focal length or faster) – this way you both never miss a shot due to insufficient shutter speed, and cameras can frequently set finer increments than is possible manually, minimizing noise.

White balance – The neutral color point of the image, or the RGB gain mix required to achieve white under a particular ambient lighting situation. For the most part, you can leave this in automatic and tweak the RAW file afterwards; however for extremely warm or cold ambient light (tungsten, shade) you may want to manually choose the respective presets to prevent overexposure of a single channel – once a channel is blown, you can’t recover it afterwards.

Note that the simple way to reduce your workload is to run the camera in aperture priority, auto-ISO and auto-white balance; just make sure that your selected shutter speed thresholds for auto-ISO fall within your desired range – slower if you want to blur motion or are using a wider lens, and vice versa. I normally have my cameras configured this way, unless I’m doing work that requires me to balance flash and ambient, or color-critical work; in which case I’ll go manual for everything.

Camera control parameters, in order of importance

Focus point/area – The shallower the depth of field, the more important it is to have some control over exactly what the camera is focusing on. Without this, you will find your subject out of focus – especially if off center. The camera can’t read your mind (or at least not yet). This said, put your camera in either center point and do the focus-half press to lock-then recompose technique, or choose your focus point manually. Make sure your subject is the most contrasty thing under the selected point, and large enough to be picked up by the AF system.

Focus mode – Single (AF-S), continuous (AF-C), or manual (MF)? Single means that the camera stops focusing once focus has been achieved for the first time. This is good for static subjects. Continuous means that the camera will continue to adjust focus until you release the shutter, which is desirable for moving subjects or very shallow depth of field lenses (a situation that may appear static – a portrait, say – may actually have motion of a few millimetres in either direction by the subject or photographer, and that’s enough to cause noticeable softness when using a very shallow depth of field lens). And finally, manual focus of course means DIY. I always have my phase detect AF cameras (DSLRs) set in AF-C, and the contrast detect cameras in AF-S; the reason for the latter choice is simple: the hit rate is much higher, and contrast detect cameras all have smaller sensors, which makes them more tolerant of minor focus errors.

And to be honest, the rest you really don’t need to worry about. For years, we’ve managed with nothing but these controls – in fact, in the early film days, you couldn’t even change your ISO easily from shot to shot, there was no such thing as colour, and there was no such thing as AF-Tracking – so really, you should be able to make a strong image focusing only on three of the parameters.

Master these, and you’ll find that you now feel in control of your camera and the images it produces, instead of vice-versa. Shooting fully manual is a good way to both learn to control your camera instinctively, as well as build an intuitive understanding for how changing a given parameter affects the look of the image; eventually you’ll build a sense for what the right parameters should be for a given shooting situation. Even if you’re an experienced photographer, sometimes a little reminder to reprioritize the important things can be helpful – the fewer things you have to think about when shooting, the better. Note that we haven’t touched on composition – that was the subject of extensive analysis in this article. MT

____________

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the reader Flickr group!

Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: controls, exposure parameters, how to, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, settings, thein

Turning pro: Six months in

October 11, 2012 by Ming Thein

Well, give or take a week or so, at any rate. As those of you who’ve been reading this site from the beginning know, I’d made the decision to be a full time photography/ creative professional sometime back in 2005; I subsequently spent the next seven years building up the courage to do it. In addition to sharing my knowledge, creating something a serious thinking photographer might like to read, and connecting with the global photographic community in general, a good portion of the objective of this site was to chronicle my journey as a photographer for others thinking of following the same path, or those who might like to live a little vicariously. This is where things like the On Assignment series of posts come into play.

It was pretty clear to me that to make things work – i.e. be able to pay the bills – I’d have to spread myself around a bit, and work on the logic of ‘a bit from many places’. Despite what it might appear, this site has not been my primary focus, and can never be; it’s simply impossible for me to write from the perspective I do if I’m not a photographer first and a blogger second. This means that whilst I’ll try to accommodate requests for gear reviews, particular topics etc – it might be a while before they hit the internet because I have to find time to do them, and find a slot in the posting schedule to put them up. Reviews of equipment are limited to what I can get loaned to me (if I think it’s worthwhile evaluating, i.e. I may consider buying it because as a tool, it does something my current gear does not) or what I buy in the course of my work. I’m not going to start reviewing Canon gear, for instance, because it simply does not make sense from a workflow point of view. By the time I get up to speed with it, I’ll have invested a huge amount of time, effort and money, and still not be as good as the established users out there.

I also don’t write daily, though thanks to the wonders of scheduled posting, you do get new content every day. That’s because I don’t have a fixed chunk of time every day, and writing – like any other creative pursuit – comes in fits and starts. I might do six articles in one particularly productive day, then nothing for a week. And yes, like a magazine, I have an editorial schedule and I also make sure I don’t repeat myself or cover something from the same angle somebody else has already done. (When you actually read this, I’ll be in Japan doing the pre-workshop reccie before I start teaching tomorrow.)

On the whole though, it’s been pretty exciting. And time has flown by. Yes, there have been boring moments, slightly bleak moments where the pipeline looks empty and the crystal ball cloudy – I’ve since come to realize that’s normal for every creative – on the whole, I’ve had a ball of a time. Even the people around me say I’m much smilier than when I worked for the man. Right now I’m just grateful that I can wake up in the morning, do something I enjoy, and make a living in the process. I don’t know how long this will continue, given the current state of the creative industry – especially in Malaysia – but I suppose it makes one appreciate it all the more.

I also want to say a big thank you to my supporters and readers; without you, I wouldn’t have written, or continue to write, and in the process push my thinking, understanding and experimentation even further; so in a way, giving back has helped me to grow creatively. Thank you also to my students of the Email School, workshop participants, DVD supporters and downloaders – what you contribute in reality isn’t money, but the freedom of time to enable me to create.

In true post-consulting style, I’ve also prepared a little dissection and analysis. MT

Things that worked out like I planned

Commercial work around my areas of specialization – watches, food, architecture.
Teaching and teaching-related activities have formed a nontrivial chunk of my income.
People like to read gear reviews.
I’m happier.
…and that’s about it.

Things that didn’t

The local market here for photography is tough: both very price sensitive, and quality-indifferent.
I’m not doing as much architecture, food and watch work as I thought; the commercial-type stuff has been getting more and more prevalent.
Payment collection is absolutely terrible, and difficult. The larger the company, the slower and more difficult.
I miss photojournalism.
The traffic volumes I have now. That said, I think I’ve reached a natural barrier: my audience is pretty specific, and definitely your more serious sort of photographer; I don’t know how many of them are out there worldwide, speak English, and would be interested in reading what I’ve written.
A lot of the smaller companies in the US and Europe who make interesting specialist gear have no interest in having their stuff reviewed, even if you are pushing a serious amount of traffic through their target markets (about 60% of my readers). I didn’t even get a reply from a lot of the companies I emailed – this is both rather disappointing and shortsighted on their part.

Things I completely didn’t expect

The friendliness, openness and civility of the international photo community. I’ve made a lot of great friends in the course of both working professionally and running the site, and it’s completely different to what the DPReview forums might have you expecting.
I’m working far longer hours than when I had an office – and I thought that was bad. These days, 14-16 hour days are normal. 7 days a week. But you know what, it doesn’t feel like work half the time.
Sometimes saying no to a bad client is the right thing to do. It feels odd at first to walk away from a job you have the capacity to do, but avoiding pain and having that veto power and control was one of the things I wanted over corporate. So I’d better learnt to make the most of it, I suppose. Happiness is now achievable.
Shooting full time for work doesn’t make you more creative. When there are clients on the line, unless they’re very, very good clients, you tend to be more conservative, if anything. This tends to limit the quality of your output somewhat. It’s tough to be creative on demand. And to make things worse, you don’t always feel like going out to do your own personal work afterwards – I almost have to force myself on some days. It’s not always easy to find inspiration for articles, or material for reviews. I think I’ve exhausted all of the places to shoot in Kuala Lumpur.
I didn’t think there’d be that many people interested in my Photoshop workflow…

Where to next?

I think the biggest change will be for me professionally: I need to differentiate myself from other offerings by going beyond photography into other creative spaces like video, design, copywriting, branding, layout etc – these are things I already do, but not in a widely publicized way. And I think having a consistent feel to all of your creative work is definitely a big value add for any potential client. Plus, it of course diversifies my income streams.
There’s an iPad app in the works. Not only will it feature some brand new content specific to the platform, but it will also let you read your favorite blog daily and search the archives in a much more meaningful way. And to go with it, there will be small video tutorial segments along with ‘request an answer’ type functionality – no more waiting for DVDs in the mail!
At the first year anniversary of this site, I plan to collate and publish the more interesting and time-independent posts into an ebook. I notice that a lot of questions asked have already been answered in detail in other posts, which says to me either people are lazy, or my indexing is rubbish – probably the latter. Plus it’s a shame to go to all that effort and just have things lost in the ether. According to WordPress, there’s over 400 posts and 600,000 words of content on the site – that’s the equivalent of three or four thick paperback books. I might even print a few if the demand is there.
I will continue to remain brand agnostic – using the best tool for the job – but in the interests of full disclosure, I have and will continue to work with Leica, Olympus, Shriro (Carl Zeiss, Profoto and Gitzo) and several other local partners.
Trying to figure out a better search/ indexing feature for the site.
More workshops! This time, I’ll go where you want me to, not where I think might be interesting. Big difference.

____________

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the reader Flickr group!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: article, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, six months, thein, Turn, turning pro

On Assignment: concert photojournalism

October 9, 2012 by Ming Thein

Tompi. Olympus OM-D, 100-300

I recently played the role of official photographer for a producer friend’s concert – it was a moderately large affair featuring a good number of famous local musicians. The nice thing about this event was that it was large enough to have professional acts, decent lighting and good organization, but not so large that I didn’t have access to everything – and I mean everything, including the stage itself during the performance*.

*One thing a good concert photographer should never do is interfere with the act; so even though the stage might be open to you, one should never get between the performers and the audience unless it’s absolutely necessary, and even then only for the shortest possible period of time. Oh, and remember that the shutter sound carries quite clearly through any microphones that have been placed near equipment.

Through the legs. Nikon D700, 28/1.8G

Although I’m not normally a huge fan of the types of music being played, I have to say this was one of the more enjoyable events I’ve attended and shot; I guess I’d be the restless type of concertgoer who’s only happy with a camera in hand and backstage pass – not so much to meet the artists, but to shoot. Although it’s the first photojournalism assignment I’ve done in quite some time – and the first concert assignment in many years. (In 2005/6 I was the house photographer at one of the jazz clubs in Kuala Lumpur, but I eventually stopped because I wasn’t getting enough sleep after gigs and before work the next day.) This job made me realize just how much I missed photojournalism.

Nikon D700, 28/1.8 G

There were a number of photographers there from other local/ national media and international agencies; the locals were mostly using midrange APS-C bodies, kit lenses and off-brand flashes; you could tell the major agencies by their standard issue pro bodies and f2.8 zooms. Interestingly, the proliferation of lower end cameras amongst media/ newsmen – at least in Malaysia – has been getting increasingly common as these organizations seek to cut cots. I can understand the bodies passing the threshold of sufficiency and being capable of producing great results in the hands of any competent photographer, but the use of slow kit zooms just hamstrings the ability to create a picture that preserves the ambient light and feel of the scene without resorting to a flash.

In the moment. Olympus OM-D, 100-300

From experience, I know that when wearing my photojournalism hat, the lighter you can go, the better. I was carrying my D700/ MB-D10, 28/1.8 G and 85/1.8 G for close distance coverage; the OM-D and 100-300 rode shotgun for more reach. (I was also carrying the 12/2 and 45/1.8 as backup in case the D700 developed a problem, plus an SB900 for balanced fill which I didn’t land up using. My motto is go light, but not so light that you have no insurance when it comes to equipment failure.) Many of you will know that the new Nikon 28/1.8 G has proven itself to be a very capable lens even on the demanding sensor of the D800E; I’m pleased to report that both the 28 and 85 f1.8 G lenses performed flawlessly on the D700, both in terms of focusing accuracy and optical performance. The 85/1.8 G does exhibit some moderate flare with strongly backlit point sources (the hood makes almost no difference here), but I personally don’t mind it as I feel that it adds to that atmosphere and pictorial value of the image somewhat.

Keyboards. Nikon D700, 28/1.8 G

The big surprise of the night was the OM-D and 100-300 combination, however. I didn’t use AF-C; most of the time careful timing, a short burst and the extended depth of field for a given FOV due to the smaller sensor was enough. It’s rather counterintuitive for DSLR shooters, but I find that with the OM-D, just depressing the shutter all the way down and trusting the camera’s AF system yields a considerably higher hit rate than using AF-C, or worse, AF-Tracking. The 100-300 delivered excellent optical performance, even out to the 300mm limit; due to the lighting conditions I was working wide open the whole time. The lens did hunt somewhat above 200mm, but so long as I was in the ballpark, focusing was reasonably fast.

Blue note. Olympus OM-D, 100-300

So far, no surprises – I’d shot with the 100-300 in good light conditions, and been pleased with the results. The OM-D, on the other hand, seems to excel under tricky mixed-light or strong-color situations; to get a sufficiently high shutter speed – I was in the 1/45-1/60s region most of the time, at 300-400mm equivalent – I was solidly in the ISO 3200 to ISO 6400 band. In all honesty, I don’t feel the files were noticeably more noisy than the D700 for a given ISO; the only place where the smaller sensor made itself known was in dynamic range – the D700 had probably two stops extra on the OM-D. I can definitely see where the 75/1.8 would be useful though – 100mm was a bit long at times, and the extra 2 1/3 stops (probably more in transmission) would have pushed image quality even higher still.

Strumming out. Nikon D700, 28/1.8 G

All in all, a very satisfying nights’ work. Come work delivery time, the litmus test is always the client; I’m happy to say that this one passed with flying colors. “I can’t stop looking at the pictures, they’re amazing!” was the text message I got a few days after delivery. So, anybody else need a concert photographer? MT

____________

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the reader Flickr group!

One – Ramli Sarip. Nikon D700, 85/1.8 G

This is what rockers do. Nikon D700, 28/1.8 G

The loud pedal. Olympus OM-D, 100-300

Thank you to my band. Nikon D700, 28/1.8 G

The hair. Nikon D700, 85/1.8 G

Olympus OM-D, 100-300

Backstage with the fans. Nikon D700, 28/1.8 G

Filed Under: On Assignment Tagged With: concert, johor, m4/3, micro four thirds, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, nikon, nikon d800e, olympus, om-d, on assignment, photojournalism, pj, thein

Podcast of my interview today on BFM is now up…

October 8, 2012 by Ming Thein

…click here to listen. MT

Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: bfm, interview, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photokina, podcast, radio, thein

What makes an outstanding image? (part 2)

October 7, 2012 by Ming Thein

Continued from part one.

Cinematic light. Nikon D90, 18-200VR

3.5 Context
Context is the way the viewer of the image creates the story of the primary subject, using the secondary elements in the frame as mental markers. The secondary elements help to place the subject in terms of time, location, culture, era, mood, as well as giving countless other psychological clues such as wealth, poverty, uncertainty, danger, unasked questions, etc. A subject in isolation is fine for a commercial product shoot, but it lacks the emotion and narrative richness that well-framed surroundings can add. The photographer also has to ensure that the elements in the frame have the correct relative prominence, which is to say the framing should direct the eye of the viewer to the primary subject first, and then the secondary subjects in order of importance. If this is not the case, then the message of the photograph can land up being quite different to the intention of the photographer at the time of capture. Properties of a subject that affect relative prominence include size, position in the frame, relative brightness, and contrast/ color vis-a-vis the background.

The importance of context. Leica M9-P, 35/1.4 ASPH FLE

Perhaps the concept of context is best illustrated by an example: let’s take the classic photojournalism shot. Wide angle, strongly directional lighting, some atmospheric haze, angry person waving a gun front and centre standing in a shaft of sunlight, close to the camera. The background scene contains other people grimacing (we think – they’re too small and far from the camera to tell) and greatly reduced in prominence to the primary subject, some destroyed/ burned objects, and a fire, all set to an destroyed building in the background. First thing we think when we see an image like this: war. But what if the angry person wasn’t highlighted in a shaft of sunlight, the camera was closer to the other people, who now turn out to be laughing, and we see that the destroyed background building is actually abandoned and the only one in a relatively prosperous-appearing urban area? Would these two images not have a very different story?

The price of progress. Leica M8, 35/2 ASPH

4. Cultural background and history
There are some images which will never mean anything to any observers outside a closed group of people; this is because the compositional elements and subjects make reference to things that are culturally unique or specific to a historical time period. The trick to making images like this work is that they must have enough context for the viewer to be able to make a reasonably accurate guess at the context, even if they have no idea of the specific references invoked. Good examples would include any sort of cultural or religious ceremonies; historical events that were not publicised outside a particular country; or ethnic differences between different racial groups. (I doubt most viewers would be able to tell the difference between Dinka and Masaai tribespeople, for instance. But there would be enough visual cues in the frame to correctly think ‘Africa’.)

It just has to be Paris. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

I’d probably widen this to include any technical sort of photography where a good portion of the visual impact comes from the subject – fully conscious of the fact that this also covers a good portion of my own work. I could take images with identical lighting and camera/ subject positioning of say a Lange Datograph and a Lange Double Split, but only the horological afficionados are going to display any meaningful difference in excitement for one image over the other.

Seeking understanding. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

5. Human psychology
Something related to cultural background – think of it as a collective culture for the human race. There are things that universally invoke a reaction amongst the vast majority of people; for subject matter, this includes anything taboo such as death; anything universally celebrated such as birth or marriage, smiles, tears, tension, anger and anything other strong emotional cues (feel free to add to the comments if I’ve missed anything). The ability to include such cues in a very obvious way in an image further increases the overall impact of the shot – seasoned photojournalists such as those who produce reportage for National Geographic, Time, Life etc are very good at this.

Does this scene make you feel warm? Why? Nikon D700, 85/1.4 G

There’s also a second set of elements related to the human psyche that can form useful toolkit – these include use of color (or B&W); directionality of lighting, and particular hues or shades to provoke a reaction. It can be as simple an image of a place with predominantly warm hues (reds, yellows) feels cosy and inviting; the same place with shifted white balance or cooler lighting resulting in blues and whites can be made to feel clinical and sterile. Part of our response to color is down to conditioning imposed by lifestyle – incandescent light, hearth fires, sci-fi culture, medical clinics etc.# – and part of it is probably a physiological thing from our time in the jungle. It’s well known that in the natural world, brightly colored animals and plants are either that way to attract the attention of mates or other members of their species, or to warn potential predators of toxicity.

No missing the subject here. Nikon D700, 60/2.8G

#I’m sure you all had an image in your mind at every single one of these examples – now think, what was the predominant tone, color or white balance in each of those images? This article goes into the psychology of color in more detail, and this one deals with how to achieve control over color.

Finally, there are compositional rules that most people react to, to varying degrees. These include a preference for balance and symmetry; responding to leading lines, and singling out things inside natural frames. There’s also the expectation of the top of the frame being lighter than the bottom; I’m not sure where this emerges from, but I’m fairly confident it has something to do with the sky being brighter than the ground in real life.

This shot probably means more to me than it does to you, because I’m married to the subject. Leica M8, 35/2 ASPH

6. The personal connection
The one element that the photographer has almost no control over for the majority of his audience – assuming that the image is to be viewed by more than those who commissioned it or who have direct involvement in it – is to do with the personal response of the viewer. A good example would be pictures of a wedding – they’d mean something to me if it was my wedding, and I might even be able to overlook compositional shortcomings because of the moment they capture (though I suspect my wife might disagree) – but to somebody with a detached and critical eye, the images may hold very little merit. Or perhaps a well-executed still life of bananas; I might love fruit and therefore be more inclined to like the image over somebody who’s allergic to them, or perhaps suffered from one too many banana peel pranks as a kid – they, on the other hand, might be made very uncomfortable by the image indeed – and possibly not even know why.

Moral of the story: take some time to understand your audience, and you’ll be surprised at the difference in the response. It’s one of the first questions I always ask a client: is it for you, or your customers? And what would your customers want to see?

Blink and you’ll wonder if you really saw it. Nepal, Nikon D700, 24/1.4G

7. Timing.
This concept is best encapsulated in HC-B’s decisive moment philosophy: unlike with a video, you’ve only got one frame to tell the entire story. This means that everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen in the future must be captured in that one frame; it’s the relationship between the events clearly occurring in the frame, and the cues given from which the viewer’s mind interpolates what’s on both sides of the timeline. Although each of the other factors almost always have multiple possibilities that ‘work’ as an image (albeit with different stories) – there is only ever one decisive moment for each message or story. If you miss it, there are other moments, but they each have a different story. Time is a continuum and an artificial human construct, but at the same time the flow of causality is one-way. (This is getting a bit more metaphysical than intended; for more have a look at this article on the relationship between quantum mechanics and photography.)

City Hall, London. Leica M8, Voigtlander 50/1.1

8. The X factor.
Truly outstanding images have something that goes beyond items 1-6; it’s an unquantifiable something that is perhaps almost born out of luck and chance, and never to be repeated. You have to have the right subject, at the right moment, in the right light, with just enough context to tell the story but not so much as to overwhelm, and some sort of personal or emotional connection created with the viewer. (And if you’re a commercial photographer, you’ll have to create all of this from scratch on demand on a repeatable basis.) I actually think the final part of what makes an image work is a degree of controlled imperfection; this appeals at a subconscious level to the humanity of the viewer; it’s almost as though it says ‘what I saw affected me as much as it should affect you’. (Of course, there is a time and place for this, and in commercial shoots, camera shake is just sloppy.) Finally, never underestimate the importance of luck: being in exactly the right place, at the right time.

Sometimes, the patient are rewarded. Schonbrunn, Vienna. Leica M9-P, 28/2.8 ASPH

9. Conclusion
I want to finish on a high note. Even though there are a lot of elements that one has to manipulate – and a couple that you can’t control – to make an outstanding image, it’s clearly possible, because outstanding images happen all the time. And probably more frequently than we think, too – not all of them are shared with the world; Vivian Maier’s work is a great example of that. The single most important element of all isn’t covered in any of the sections above, and that’s practice and preparation. It’s also the best advice I can give to any photographer at any skill level. No matter how deep one’s understanding of the concepts is, if you don’t have a camera with you, or can’t figure out how to get the effect you want, or find the spot metering button, or accidentally shoot in a thumbnail-sized jpeg or something similar, you’re going to miss the shot. If your eye isn’t trained to passively seek out compositions all the time, then you’re going to miss something. The best thing, however, is that the element of preparedness is 100% under the control of the photographer. MT

____________

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the reader Flickr group!

Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: article, composition, essay, good, lighting, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, photography, seeing, technical, thein, what makes a good image

What makes an outstanding image? (part 1)

October 6, 2012 by Ming Thein

Apples. Nikon D800E, Zeiss ZF.2 2/100 Makro-Planar

Of the 400 or so posts I’ve published up to this point, I recently realized that the one enormously gaping hole I haven’t yet covered deals with the one of the major fundamentals: how do you actually determine if an image ‘works’ or not? What makes it good? What makes it outstanding? I think it was both a discussion on composition in our reader pool forum on Flickr, as well as the strongly mixed reactions to this photoessay post that did it – context, even a mini-article, sometimes simply isn’t enough if you’re missing a cultural familiarity, or local view. This is obviously not a simple question to answer; despite an extensive search online, I haven’t been able to find any good articles that provided any sort of conclusion. (Clearly, I must be a bit of a masochist in deciding to write this article.) Perhaps it’s because it’s an extremely subjective question to begin with; or perhaps it’s because to come up with an answer that makes sense requires a thoroughly multidisciplinary approach: strong images resonate technical, compositional, cultural, psychological and personal chords. And the final two are of course highly observer-dependant.

Two old men. Olympus OM-D, 75/1.8

In fact, it’s a wonder that we have any images at all that are globally recognized and appreciated. Rather than analyze specific images, I’m going to spend some time looking into some of the more abstract characteristics and their implications for one’s photography. I’d recommend finding a comfortable chair and grabbing a drink because this is a pretty heavy article. So heavy, in fact, I’ve decided to split it into two parts. It’s also turned out to be one of the most difficult articles to write, occupying a good couple of days thanks to the extremely vague and ill-defined nature of the subject matter. Finding the right photos to illustrate the article was just as tough; excuse me if there are some repeats of previously-posted images here.

The diving board, Hong Kong. Leica M9-P, Zeiss ZM 2.8/28

One of the most important things for a photographer to know is specifically why one of their images works, and why another one doesn’t. I was going through my contacts’ uploads on Flickr the other day and noticing that there were three types of photographers:
a) upload everything, no QC or editing whatsoever, mostly poor images;
b) upload most things, has one or two really good images, mostly mediocre;
c) only uploads good stuff, and shows a consistent level of quality.

Type a almost certainly has no idea of what makes a good image, or perhaps they don’t really care; we must remember that social media is also used for indiscriminate sharing. Type b appears to be a more serious amateur, and wants to make good images, and probably knows a good image when they see one, but is unable to deconstruct their successful images into a series of things that they can replicate. The final type, c, knows what works, and either doesn’t bother shooting the rest, or hits the delete key pretty fast when something isn’t quite right. I want to get us all to type c.

*Note that this article contains a lot more links than anything before – it’s because I’ve previously explored a lot of these individual concepts in some depth, but never unified them in a single article – this one.

Omega Speedmaster 9300. Nikon D800E, 85/2.8 PCE

Let’s begin.

1. Subject
There is simply no point to a photograph or image if there is no subject. An image is a representation of something: if there’s nothing to represent, or it isn’t clear what the representation is trying to be, then why bother at all? This doesn’t mean to say that abstract images don’t work; in such cases, the abstraction and entire frame are the subjects themselves. But in the broadest possible sense, if you look at an image and it isn’t fairly obvious what the image is about, then it fails. A photograph without a subject is like a meal with no main course, or a story without a plot – it can fill an immediate transient need, but it will not have any lasting consequence or memorability.

The cloud. Sony RX100

The sole implication for the photographer is that you need to know what the subject of your image is going to be before you take the shot, and how the other elements in the frame relate to it and tell the story. Or maybe they don’t relate to it and create an inverse story of juxtaposition and contrast; it all depends on what you’re trying to say with the image. The subject also needs to stand out and be visually obvious, it should be the (metaphorical and optical) focal point of your image. We’ll deal with that in section three. Bottom line: you need to have a clear picture in your own mind about what the image is about; invariably not everything is executable, so this picture gets increasingly blurred as it comes closer to physical execution – hence ensuring that you start off with as strong an idea as possible is paramount.

Hommage a Claude Monet. Nikon D800E, Zeiss ZF.2 2/100 Makro-Planar

2. Execution and technicalities
Next comes the simplest of the ‘secondary’ criteria. Even this is relative, however. Generally speaking, a good image is properly exposed for the subject, is in focus, and doesn’t take processing to the extremes. The executional characteristics of the image should not be the first thing you notice when you look at the photograph: you can overdo it**. They should support the compositions, but not detract or outweigh it. This is one of the things I don’t like about overdone HDR, Instagram and other photo apps – the processing is so overdone to the point that fundamental compositional structure is overshadowed, and any flaws hidden. You only see the processing, and not the subject.

Seeing the wood from the trees. Leica M9-P, 21/3.4 ASPH

However, there are always exceptions to every rule. And in the case of the technical qualities of an image, if you have an exceedingly strong subject or composition, then no matter how poor your execution, the subject is what you’re going to see first. Nobody remembers Robert Capa’s iconic Normandy landing shots for their technical perfection, but rather the subject matter and how he managed to convey the chaotic, haunting, gritty sensation of actually being there.

Service – with just the right amount of motion blur. Sony RX100

I include processing under technical execution. The biggest fundamental choice you have here is whether to work in color or black and white; some subjects are particularly suited to one or the other; some could go either way. Whether you should use one or the other depends mostly on whether your subject is best isolated by luminance/ brightness or by contrast in color. (This topic is subject to an entirely separate article here.)

**I cover processing workflow in general here, and here for B&W.

After work. Olympus OM-D, 45/1.8

3. Composition
In its simplest definition, composition is how the various elements of an image are located relative to one another, and how this spatial relationship tells the story of the main subject or conveys the desired message. However, there are some restrictions – firstly, we are representing a three-dimensional space in two dimensions, and secondly, there are perspectives imposed by the field of view we choose to employ. The reduction to two dimensions has both strengths and weaknesses: you cannot rely on depth perception to create perspective; instead, we have to artificially impose it through our choice of focal length. However, its removal also means that we can do things that aren’t possible via native human vision, such as have everything in the frame simultaneously in focus. Mastery of composition is knowing when to use the right tool to enhance the presentation of the subject.

Dessert, before and after being enjoyed. Nikon D700, 60/2.8G

That said, for any given subject and situation, there is no one perfect composition – rather, there are probably any number of compositions that can work. However, the big difference is that they will not all tell the same story. Again, there is no right or wrong here: the best story for a given situation will depend very much on what the end objective is for the image.

This article and this article both enter into more detail on compositional theory.

Vanishing point. Leica M8, 21/1.4 ASPH

3.1 Isolation/ separation/ focus
This concept lacks a single defining word – I suppose ‘focus’ would be closest, but the problem is that tends to induce confusion between the subject distance and the concentration around the idea or subject of the image. The ideal qualitative effect is that the eye of the viewer must go straight to the primary subject of the photograph, and then only on to the context that surrounds it, in the order that the photographer desires. This can be accomplished through the use of a number of different tools – leading lines, natural frames, negative space, bokeh etc. The subject itself must stand out from the background or surroundings; in that sense, some sort of natural frame is always required to provide the necessary isolation – it could be a doorway, or a plain color background of a different color to the subject, or a contrast in texture. The sole exception is a whole-frame abstract, where the entire image is the subject. Note that lighting is the other major source of subject separation. (And yes, there is such a thing as too much bokeh.)

Before the take. Nikon D700, Zeiss ZF 1.4/85

3.2 Perspective
There is no right or wrong perspective for any given subject. The sole aim of perspective is to either emphasize or de-emphasize the foreground relative to the background. Does the subject need to be larger than life, or minimized? Does the image require context to understand properly, and how prominent should these contextual elements be relative to the primary focus of the image?

Trees. Ricoh GRDIII

In general, wide-angle perspectives need a clear subject placed in the foreground. This need for a defined foreground decreases as the focal length increases, to a point where it could really go either way at roughly 50mm and above (35 equivalent). Above that, the foreground and background are of similar prominence, and subject separation is no longer achieved through perspective, insofar as depth of field is a consequence of a particular focal length and perspective. Images shot with a wide lens that lack a clear foreground can work, but only under specific circumstances which almost always involve leading lines, or large amounts of context and unusually good subject separation. Similarly, one must also take care with the use of telephotos – you can focus on the subject to the point of exclusion of all context, which can actually weaken an image.

Mt. Yotei. Nikon D700, Zeiss ZF.2 2/100 Makro-Planar

3.3 Balance
I’ve always found this to be one of the more difficult things to define. Instinctively, you know whether something is balanced or not on looking at it – but what it is specifically that creates, or destroys, that sense of balance is much more difficult to quantify. The eye of the viewer needs to linger for about the same amount of time in every portion of the frame; if you have half of the frame that takes a split second to understand but produces no context, against the complex opposite half of the frame where there’s a lot going on and a few moments of deciphering are required, then you generally might as well not bother with the quicker part.

Breguet Tradition. Balanced, but not perfectly symmetric. Nikon D700, 60/2.8G

Doesn’t make sense? Boil it down to opposites. Balance is like symmetry, but not quite; the mirror images do not have to be identical, nor do they have to be symmetric around the dead center of the frame. If the left half of your frame has something in it, then the right half must too, of roughly the same size and level of detail. This is independent of the subject. Now quarters: you can do opposite top-left and bottom-right and leave the other two corners empty, but if you do three corners and omit one, the eye is going to go straight to the empty corner because it’s the odd one out. You might actually want to do that, but make sure it’s a conscious choice. You can keep subdividing your frame and finding opposing points around the middle to balance out, but generally once something gets to be say less than 10% of the frame size in any linear dimension (1% area) then it’s usually inconsequential enough to ignore – so long as it doesn’t intrude into your subject.

This of course also applies to your subject too: don’t make it too small, otherwise no matter how balanced your frame, it won’t stand out!

There are always exceptions to every rule. Nikon D800E, Zeiss ZF.2 2/100 Makro-Planar

3.4 Lighting
I just completed a whole series on lighting here – intro to equipment, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and tips and tricks.

With no light, there can be no photography. The direct meaning of ‘photography’ is ‘writing with light’. Light identifies and isolates your subject; the softness or hardness or uniformity of it determines the amount of definition and contrast, as well as the tonality; the color and hue determine the feeling of the scene. And the absolute amount of it has an impact on the technical quality of the image, too. It’s inescapable that every good image must have good light – you can make an ordinary subject into an arresting photograph if it’s properly lit, but no amount of photoshop or the most unusual object is going to surmount flat or uninteresting light.

Prague. This would not be interesting on a flat, gray day at noon. Olympus E-PM1 Pen Mini, 45/1.8

Photographers must therefore either be able to recognize when the light is right, and seek out subjects to be illuminated by it – or go one step further and learn to control it. In fact, you have to do the former before you can do the latter – understanding the origin of a particular look makes it much, much easier to reverse engineer and replicate. Distilling things further, we’re arrive at the inescapable conclusion that successful lighting hinges on directionality, nothing more and nothing less. The right directionality creates the right kinds of shadows and highlights, which in turn creates contrast, texture and subject definition. And the less common the direction (light), the better – why do you think psychologically, we don’t find images shot in noon sunlight or under common indoor artificial light to be particularly arresting? It’s because that’s what we are conditioned to seeing most of the time. However, golden hours or special lighting effects are much less common. But I’m starting to digress into psychology, which I’ll leave for section 5.

Come back tomorrow for the conclusion in part two.

____________

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the reader Flickr group!

Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: article, composition, essay, good, lighting, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, photography, seeing, technical, thein, what makes a good image

Workshop report: 30 Sep Finding Light in Kuala Lumpur

October 5, 2012 by Ming Thein

Group portrait with chiaroscuro. Sony RX100

Two days after the Making Light Workshop, three of the original (masochistic?) participants joined three more new ones for a part two: Finding Light. I originally decided to run these as a pair to collaborate with photographer Kristian Dowling, who was unfortunately not able to make either one of the workshops in the end. No biggie.

Quartered. Sony RX100

The underlying point behind the pair of workshop sessions was that street and studio are far more related than you might think: how are you going to create stunning light and compositions if you don’t know what it looks like? Similarly, how is one going to recognize it if you don’t know what is possible when all of the elements of the photograph are within the control of the photographer?

Why would this not be street photography? Olympus OM-D, ZD60/2.8

We started off with the obligatory coffee, a discussion on what street photography is and isn’t, and some thoughts on etiquette, before finishing with a quick critique of participant images. Street photography, to me, is something that is a very ill-defined genre (and to be the subject of another article, I think) – let’s just say for now that anything you see when walking is fair game – people, street scenes, abstracts, architecture. I generally approach it from a reportage perspective. On the subject of etiquette, I think it’s simple: don’t do anything you wouldn’t want done to you. This includes unflattering images and invasion of personal space.

Untitled. Sony RX100

For the first hour or so, we just walked – no cameras were allowed. This was to encourage participants to start seeing and looking for frames; I would stop and point out interesting things, compositions, geometries and other potential shots, to the point that before we reached the first staging point, there were several cameras out…

Exercise one covered seeing in place: conveniently, the place I selected for lunch was deliberately done so because of both the quality of its beef noodles, as well more importantly, the fact that it was an extremely rich photographic hunting ground. Once duly refueled, the participants were required to stay in their seats, and shoot from that position. Lens changes were allowed. This forced them to think carefully about perspectives, foregrounds, potentially intrusive elements, as well as of course composition and light.

Shooting in place. It forces you to find compositions in a scene; those little documentary moments.

For the second exercise we did something I like to call ‘stages’. The stage, in street photography, is a background or backdrop with a interesting texture or light; it’s a good way of teaching anticipation and timing because the composition is predetermined, and the photographer just waits for subject to walk through the right portion of the stage before pressing the shutter button.

A staged example. Sony RX100

Next came timing and anticipation – I like to use point and shoots to teach this because they have just about the right amount of shutter lag to represent your reaction time when shooting with a responsive camera; however for this exercise we substituted with a 2-second self timer.

Practicing timing with the help of a handy wall, and lots of pedestrians. The objective was to trap the pedestrian at the very edge of the wall – but while the 2-second self timer was running. Olympus OM-D, ZD60/2.8

Another tool I like to use is layering; this can be achieved by means of reflections, stacked foregrounds and backgrounds, or longer perspectives – or perhaps a combination of all three. This technique works quite well when there’s a lot of glass around, but becomes more challenging when you are in a ‘dirty’ environment and nothing is clean or reflective.

Bus reflections. Olympus OM-D, ZD60/2.8

The final, and most difficult exercise of the day was to learn to hold your ground and shoot through people – this lets you get very, very close indeed, to the point of having headshots with a 50mm. It requires some courage to position yourself in the middle of a stream of pedestrians, but once the participants built up their confidence, it became easy – just look like you belong.

Shoot through exercise. Sony RX100

And a result of this technique. Olympus OM-D, ZD60/2.8

Putting everything together wrapped up the day – an opportunity for the participants to figure out which of the techniques best suited their style by just shooting anything and everything – and I’m pleased to report a huge improvement in composition and angle from the images I saw at the first briefing. I think what was most telling is that none of them really had the same style – it was a consistent mix of the various techniques taught, and with different subjects. Well done!

Divided reality – my personal shot of the day. Note leading lines, quadrants, context, perspective use, human elements…Sony RX100

Based on the success and feedback of this session, I’ll probably be doing another introduction to street photography workshop in Kuala Lumpur at some point, as well as a standalone introduction to Photoshop day – both will be for a very limited number of participants – I like to keep things small because it allows me to give each person more attention – please visit again regularly for updates. MT

A visual metaphor for our banking system. Sony RX100

____________

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting the site via Paypal ([email protected]); Ming Thein’s Email School of Photography – learn exactly what you want to learn, when you want to learn it or learn how to achieve a similar look with our Photoshop workflow DVDs. You can also get your gear from Amazon.com via this referral link. Prices are the same as normal, however a small portion of your purchase value is referred back to me. Thanks!

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the Flickr group!

Filed Under: Teaching Tagged With: 30 september 2012, finding light, kuala lumpur, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, street, street photography, teaching, thein, Workshop

OpEd: The democratization of photography and the state of affairs in Malaysia

October 4, 2012 by Ming Thein

Inclusive? Exclusive? Fair? You be the judge. Nikon D5100, AFS 85/1.4 G

This article was originally written by me to provide context for the 2012 Maybank Photographer of The Year Awards, for which I’m serving as Chief Judge. It was published in The Malaysian Reserve, 14 September 2012 edition. Reproduced with permission. A scan of the original article is available here.

Humans are visual people: we are drawn to things that look different, things that are aesthetically pleasing, and above all, things that communicate with us at an emotional level. This applies to both objects and photographs; in fact, half of the neural connections in our brains are related to vision in some way. What’s changed notably in the last eight years – since 2004 – is an explosion in visual content creation, sharing and awareness, fueled by proliferation of internet access, falling prices of digital cameras, and more recently, the rise of social media.

I pick 2004 as the turning point because it was a landmark year for photographers: it brought the affordable consumer digital SLR. Professional quality was now accessible to the masses at a tenth of the former cost, reducing the sole differentiator of photographers again to skill. More importantly, the learning process became extremely fast thanks to instant feedback. With film, you might not see the results of your experiments for days or weeks.

This gave birth to a new generation of digital-only photographers who have no affinity to Velvia or Neopan or Tri-X. Today’s generation even further removed – film is merely what the various Insta-whatsit or Hipsta-thingy app filters try to emulate. Yet, mostly due to that instant feedback loop, the average standard of today’s generation of photographers is higher than ever, with increasing numbers of people getting interested in and trying to make a living from photography. In fact, there are so many photographers everywhere now that it’s normal for the most people to sling a DSLR around their necks when they leave the house, and share everything with their friends online later. We communicate visually.

I’m of the transitional generation. I started pre-2004 with both film and digital – one helped me understand the other – and ‘turned pro’ in early 2012. There are two definitions ‘pro’: one, is that you make the vast majority of your income from photography or related activities; the other is that your images are of a consistently high standard, regardless of the conditions or subject. There are plenty of the former, but precious few of the latter – and the majority cut their teeth during the silver halide days. I aim to be both.

What photography clients often overlook is that you generally pay more for experience, translating into consistency. And it’s as much about time as it is about the number of experiments you’ve done or things you’ve tried. A chimpanzee could probably make ten incredible images out of a million through random chance alone. A professional should hit that mark nine times out of ten. As the client, it’s your responsibility to be educated about the services you’re paying for. Needless to say, selecting a provider with price as sole criteria – sadly a common practice in Malaysia – is a poor guarantor of quality. Thanks to the internet, it’s very easy to find specialist photographers and quickly identify if they’re good or not; in fact, picking a niche and excelling at it is probably the only way professional photographers can survive commercially in the longer term.

There are actually a number of world-class commercial photographers in Malaysia – but we don’t hear much about them here because they do the majority of their work outside the country. Much of my own business comes from Singapore and Switzerland – I specialize in watches, food and architecture, which also happen to be personal passions.

As organizations and individuals, it’s important that we do what we can to support the creative industries, beyond photography. The government can budget for ‘innovation incentives’, but something more than that is needed to make creativity flourish and grow: an ecosystem. Any industry creative will agree that inspiration isn’t always available on demand, but the environment is a large contributing factor. Take The Louvre, for example. Its archive gives inspiration to budding artists, and supports an ecosystem of its own, providing intellectual nourishment for future generations. Malaysia needs a legacy like that.

In a previous life, I was a director in the education and professional services sectors. Come recruitment time, I was saddened after interviewing many graduates with great paper scores – they were simply unable to perform at all in a professional environment. The missing elements? Creative thinking and initiative. At the same time, there’s still a ray of hope: at a recent major competition I judged, the best entries by far – and the bulk of the shortlisted ones – came from the student category. There is potential out there; we need to nurture it.

Support comes in many forms. There is commercial recognition – giving fair value for a professional service, recognizing and rewarding quality. Then there is also intellectual recognition – public acknowledgement and respect for the creator’s (and photographer) intellectual property rights. (Don’t know what an image license is? Don’t be afraid to ask). People are proud to show their best work – especially to a wide audience.

Equally important is teaching and encouragement. Since early this year, I’ve tried to do my part via http://www.mingthein.com. I aim to give back to the greater photographic community by openly sharing thoughts on technique, philosophy, and the life of a professional photographer – something beyond the other million gear reviews. The response has been fantastic so far – over a quarter of a million international visitors every month.

Collectively, this is why as a professional, a creative, and a Malaysian, I was proud to be invited to serve as Chief Judge for the inaugural Maybank Photographer of The Year Awards. It’s great to see a major company recognizing the importance of creativity, and giving Malaysians an opportunity to showcase their work, and the incentive to up their game. There are some pretty sweet prizes, too. As tempted as I am to enter instead of judging, I’m much more excited about seeing the entries. MT

The Maybank Photographer of The Year Awards may be entered online at www.maybankphotoawards.com. Submissions are open from 3 September to 31 October.

____________

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and join the Flickr group!