mingthein.com – Ming Thein

New year’s resolutions, 2019 edition

January 1, 2019 by Ming Thein

Perhaps a more accurate title for today’s post isn’t so much ‘resolutions’ as ‘expectations’. I like to think that after a while in the same industry*, one acquires the maturity to know what you want to do, what you can do, and what you realistically might be able to expect. Here’s my plan for 2019, both photographic and otherwise. Some stuff I’ll have already said to various individuals or gotten lost in various comments, but as yet things have not been unified. So, to hopefully stem the tide of ‘are you going to x’ emails, here goes…

*Shooting since 2001, for clients part time since 2005, and full time since 2012 – that’s a good 18, 14 or 7 years, depending on how you want to measure it. Even 7 years in the digital era is an age given how fast things change.

Photoessay: Window seat II

December 30, 2018 by Ming Thein

One day, I promise I’ll do a post of images shot through dirty windows, but it’s just not as interesting most of the time – and it’s difficult to not make it come across more like a hipster filter. I don’t know if I’m the only person to spend most of the flight anxiously gazing out of the window in case I miss something interesting (and annoying the passengers around me who are trying to sleep by having the only open shade in the cabin) – but at least the scrolling scenery makes the flight go a bit faster. As we’ve discussed in the past, picking the right side of the aircraft is crucial – you don’t want to be shooting into the sun simply because all of the crap that’s going to reflect off the micro scratches in the windows, robbing contrast and leaving all sorts of strange artefacts. I’m also increasingly finding myself torn between a larger format for better color (not dynamic range in this case; the windows lower contrast to the point it doesn’t really matter much) or a smaller format for higher shutter speeds (f2.8 on M4/3 is sufficient to keep everything in focus at infinity, and lenses are usually very sharp cross-frame by this point too) as the light falls. I’ve had good and bad results from both options in pretty much equal measure. The one thing I haven’t been able to do consistently yet – because of the aircraft motion – is get a decent image in very low twilight or at night; there’s both simply no way to get enough shutter speed or block out light from the cabin. As with all things, more practice is required…MT

Shot over far too many flights with a wide variety of hardware, and post processed with Photoshop Workflow III – you can’t do SOOC JPEG for these because there just isn’t enough contrast thanks to all that glass and perspex.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: aerial, airplane, flight, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photoessay, photography, thein, window seat

Keeping photowalks fresh

December 27, 2018 by Robin Wong

I have led hundreds of photowalks within Kuala Lumpur and a few outside of the city and I have yet to tire of them. There have been official outings and workshops for local photography clubs or consumer events for camera manufacturers as well as private and solo outings over the years. I believe that a photowalk is essential for any photographer. If you are a professional photographer, commercial shoots may bring food to the table but personal photowalks are an opportunity fore creative experimentation and growth. For this article, I shall define photowalks as not strictly street photography per se, but a wider involvement of multiple disciplines in photography that may include city architecture, urban decay, street portraits, and any other genres with subject contents widely available at photowalk locations.

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Filed Under: Robin Wong Tagged With: avoiding boredom, creativity, mingthein.com, photowalks, robin, Robin Wong, wong

The most important things in photography

December 24, 2018 by Ming Thein

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In the better part of 17 years’ worth of shooting – there are just a few critical things I find are inescapable when taking the shot. I perhaps have the benefit of having gone full circle a couple of times around the effort and equipment wheel, and shifting priorities force me to work both faster and smarter. Please note that the descriptions following have some subtlety and may at first seem contradictory, but bear with me…

Working with overcast light

December 21, 2018 by Robin Wong

When the weather is overcast and light is not great, street photographers (myself included) usually lose motivation to continue shooting. After all, light plays a vital role in producing results. With less than ideal lighting, there is no opportunity for the widely practiced deep shadow and highlight play, silhouette shots or even dramatic high contrast shots, both in color or black and white. I do envy photographers in regions further away from the tropics (Japan, Australia, Northern European countries), where directional beautiful light is more common and present for an extended period of the day. In Malaysia where I reside, if there isn’t tropical afternoon showers, then we have to contend with haze or harsh light for most of the day. Directional and interesting light is confined to mornings and just before sunset.

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Filed Under: On Photography, Robin Wong Tagged With: article, mingthein.com, overcast, photography, robin, Robin Wong, wong

MT’s scrapbook: Duo

December 18, 2018 by Ming Thein

I happened to be staying at the hotel in this rather interesting property a couple of months back; whilst I don’t think I’d want to live here (there are apartments in one of the other towers) because it feels a bit cold and impersonal – the architects did a good job breaking up the potentially overbearingly massive geometric forms with cladding and ground landscaping, so you never feel that dominance at ground level. There’s no question some very clever structural engineering was involved to make the masses balance (and to install that curtain wall). The interior spaces are strange though – despite the size of the building, they never feel very large inside; I don’t know if this is due to the internal space division or the very non-square geometry. Still, it made for a pleasant half an hour or so’s worth of diversion wandering around and hunting for images. MT

The Scrapbook series is shot on an Olympus PEN F, with unedited JPEGs straight from camera bar resizing (and of course some choice settings). One or two were reprocessed to match the rest of the set using The Monochrome Masterclass workflow, for visual consistency and correction of verticals.

Robin visits South Africa, part II

December 16, 2018 by Robin Wong

Continued from Part 1

It was hard to believe how close we were able to get to the wild animals in Madikwe Game Reserve. Our park ranger drove us as close as 5 meters from the animals! The feeling of potentially fatal danger was persistent even while we busied ourselves composing images. The animals kept turning toward us and glancing at us from time to time, but they never showed any sign of aggression or agitation. I guess they’re so used to human presence with the never-ending stream of tourists that pass through the reserve. I was thrilled to be able to continue shooting my portraits of strangers, only this time my subjects were wild animals instead of humans.

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Filed Under: Robin Wong Tagged With: mingthein.com, olympus, robin, Robin Wong, south africa, travel, wong

Robin visits South Africa, part I

December 15, 2018 by Robin Wong

Let me begin by expressing my gratitude for the overwhelmingly positive response to my recent announcement about joining the Olympus Visionary team. I am grateful to have such supportive readers and have come this far thanks to your support. So please do continue to visit the site regularly as MT and myself endeavour to produce content.

From December 7th to 13th, I traveled to South Africa with a group of Olympus Visionaries from Asia Pacific. This photography trip was fully sponsored by Olympus with the objective of encouraging the 19 photographers from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea and Australia to share ideas, inspire each other and to work more closely with Olympus. We went to Madikwe Game Reserve for safari shoots and stayed at the Tau Game Lodge. We spent 3 days going out in the field, trying to capture wildlife and nature shots. This particular trip was full of new experiences for me. For this first part of my South Africa series, I will share wider landscape and environmental photographs of the locations we visited.

All images shot with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and M.Zuiko PRO lenses (300mm F4 PRO IS, 40-150mm F2.8 PRO and 7-14mm F2.8 PRO).

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Filed Under: Robin Wong Tagged With: mingthein.com, olympus, robin, Robin Wong, south africa, travel, wong

Guest review: the 2018 Nikon Z6

December 12, 2018 by Praneeth Rajsingh

MT: Today’s thoughts on the Z6 should be thought of as an accompaniment to my Z7 review and are courtesy of the man behind the scenes and one of the partners in my watch venture, Praneeth Rajsingh, who’s the one keeping me organised and pointing in the right direction these days. I tried to get him to buy the Z7, but he knows his sufficiency threshold…

Hello! While I’m usually involved behind the scenes, Ming thought it might be interesting to have me share my thoughts on the new Nikon Z6 – which I recently acquired. As an amateur photographer who only buys gear to meet his needs (and budget), my review will not be the comprehensive and in-depth coverage that MT excels at, but I hope some of you find it useful.

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Filed Under: Gearhead: Reviews Tagged With: gearhead, mingthein.com, nikon, praneeth, praneeth rajsingh, rajsingh, review, z6, z6 review

Photoessay: vignettes of melancholy and longing

December 9, 2018 by Ming Thein

Here’s a slightly unusual (and personal) curation, matching my usual mood: I hugely cut down the amount of travel I’ve been doing (after pretty much ten years of non stop, at least twice a month work trips), starting in the second half of 2017 and continuing on to 2018. But the last couple of months have reminded me precisely why I made that choice: yes, you get to do some fun stuff, but it’s also fatiguing, you don’t see your family (worse, if your wife happens to have an opposite travel schedule which means you’re never in the same place at the same time), hotels are soulless, and working off a laptop with a malfunction keyboard (hello, double alphabets) and trackpad (goodbye, click!) when you’re used to a dual screen 27″-32″ setup is positively claustrophobic (and unproductive). Hell, I even miss my car and my polar bears. Sometimes these feelings concentrate, and leave you with an odd sort of creative inspiration that makes you search the back catalog and realise that at some point – many points, really – in your previous travels, you’ve felt exactly the same way. And it somehow made you a little creative at the time. And I have to say, in an odd way – that cheered me up. MT

Shot over a long, long period of time with a wide variety of equipment. Mostly processed with PS Workflow III.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: melancholy, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photoessay, photography, thein, vignettes