mingthein.com – Ming Thein

Dealing with visual overload

January 9, 2016 by Ming Thein

During a recent Masterclass with some of my students, we were faced with an situation quite typical of a working pro: several hours of nothing much going on, half an hour of madness, and a bit of a post-mortem afterwards. The main feeling I got from the group was best described as a sort of mild panic: after being lulled into a state of half-hearted inactivity by uninspiring light and a fairly pedestrian subject, we were suddenly handed great light, rapidly changing conditions and the same pedestrian subjects come alive. This is by no means a unique situation, and sometimes the situation is a one-off and professionally critical. So what’s the best way to maximise photographic returns?

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Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: article, essay, focus, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, saturation, thein, visual overload, working quickly

Photoessay-project-WIP: Crust

January 7, 2016 by Ming Thein

Today’s post is going to be the first time I’ve presented a partially completed project – for the simple reasons that I feel it’s probably useful to discuss the creative process, because it’ll make a good follow on to this post on projects in general and because I have honestly no idea if or when I’ll ever be able to complete this set. The idea behind Crust is fairly self-explanatory: the dried, hard, textured earth from the air in monochrome – all the better to enhance the suggestion we may well be looking at a highly magnified burnt breakfast offering*.

*And I think I might well shoot that as the title image, too.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: aerial, aerial photography, art, crust, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photography, project, thein, WIP

Being a photographer today

January 5, 2016 by Ming Thein

Whoops, that was yesterday. But I don’t think any reader will mind the eye candy.

There is a point to the ‘wrong’ image: it ain’t like it used to be, and if that’s a cliche and somewhat ill-fitting statement given I haven’t been in this game that long, perhaps it’s also a sign of just how fast the market is changing. As I come to the end of my fourth year full time as a photographer and start planning for the fifth, I’ve got to ask myself what’s changed in the last few years and where that fits with my plans (or rather how I’ve got to adapt not to be left behind). What’s a bit frightening is that niches seem to be coming and going both extremely fast and in a way that is almost impossible to predict what works and what doesn’t; luck, as always, plays a massive role in the proceedings.

Photoessay: More from the air (and some tips)

January 3, 2016 by Ming Thein

Somewhere over Scotland

Today’s photoessay is a series of images that is both a continuation of the dreamscape series and the result of spending far too much time on an aeroplane in the last few months – think of it as the fruit of doing a little homework before departure. Of course, shooting from a chartered helicopter is nice, but also not something undertaken without a client or access to a central bank’s vault – preferably from a country that’s still solvent.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: aerial, aerial photography, landscape, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photoessay, photography, thein

New year’s resolutions, 2016

January 1, 2016 by Ming Thein

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Strung out: this is the photography market at present. Some fruit, none of it low hanging, all of it complex, a complex tangle to reach it and the illusion of blue skies and possibilities.

If there’s one thing I take away from 2015, is that the photographic market is getting more and more complex. There are tradeoffs in every choice – from clients to specialisation to hardware. And for me, 2016 is going to have to be spent sorting a large chunk of that out. But first, let’s see how I did against my 2015 goals.

Photoessay – Architectural details of Aalen and Schwäbisch Gmünd

December 31, 2015 by Ming Thein

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A few more images from my time in Germany earlier in the year – there are a lot of geometrically simple yet interesting architectural details dotted around the towns of Aalen and Schwäbisch Gmünd; of course I suspect they might be rather more depressing without the benefit of such strongly directional autumn light. I would consider this set to be mainly studies of form and texture; distillation of a scene into almost unrelated and non-contextural component elements and nothing more. Regardless of the subject, the aesthetics of an image boil down to this – every compositional element has different visual weight and presence that’s contingent on color and the amount of image it occupies, in addition to relativity to the rest of the frame. Sometimes it’s nice to be free from the expectations and preconventions a particular subject might imply – portraits must include the eyes, for example; or buildings a sense of scale. Enjoy, and lastly, Happy New Year! MT

This series was shot with a Sony A7RII, Zeiss 1.8/85 Batis and 2.8/35 PC Distagon. You can learn the underlying postprocessing in the Weekly Photoshop Workflow series.

Photoessay: Germany, on the move

December 29, 2015 by Ming Thein

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Today’s photoessay comes from a much earlier trip in the year to Zeiss HQ in Germany; I had a lot of connections and a lot of transit time. The camera naturally falls to hand and one starts observing and recording. Having personally spent a lot of time in transit in a large number of countries around the world, I always find it remarkable how developed countries are quite similar – but somehow little things make a difference in implementation and efficiency of the overall system. Whilst German public transport lacks the brutal efficiency of the Swiss, it also lacks the unpredictability of the French and Italians, so I suppose that’s reason not to complain…MT

This series was shot with a Leica Q, Sony A7RII and Zeiss 1.8/55 FE and 1.8/85 Batis lenses. You can learn the underlying postprocessing in the Weekly Photoshop Workflow series.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: germany, life, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, people, photoessay, photography, thein, transport

New: MT’s Weekly PS Workflow Classroom

December 27, 2015 by Ming Thein

PS weekly review

It’s time to take postprocessing further in the new year.

Given the popularity of the photoshop and postprocessing videos, and the continual feedback for more of the same – I’ve decided to try an experiment for 2016. Every week, with the first instalment available on 3 Jan 2016, I’ll be putting out a new video. The concept is simple: it’s a classroom where submitted images are critiqued and postprocessed and subscriber questions answered. This is the closest I can get to a providing a consistent learning environment for a large audience.

Subscribers can submit images of their own; I will try to critique all of them
We select the most interesting to post process in ACR/photoshop using workflow II, with a discussion of the rationale behind it
Any subscriber questions are answered
In addition, I postprocess images of my own so you can see the complete workflow from capture and conception to completion – to see how the complete ‘idea’ comes together (i.e. capture with previsualized output)

Each weekly video will run for ~1h15min.

Christmas humour 2015: Photographers’ beliefs

December 25, 2015 by Ming Thein

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In the tradition of previous years…today’s post takes a break from any serious sort of photography. Merry Christmas, all!

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Filed Under: Off topic Tagged With: christmas, christmas 2015, christmas humor, humour, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, thein

Photoessay: Paradise Lost, part I: the daydream

December 23, 2015 by Ming Thein

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What if inanimate objects had a soul? Hopes, dreams, lives, consciousness, a feeling of purpose? Do they have salad days? What happens when they retire, descend into old age and start to feel their mortality? How does a retirement community for Air Force aircraft feel?

Paradise Lost is a project I’ve been working on for the last few months that attempts to answer some of these questions in a photographic interpretation. At some point, I’ll expand this to include other machinery – mining equipment would be fantastic (but tricky to access) and cars are probably the next logical steep (and easier to execute). The first part of the series is supposed to evoke feelings of daydreaming, wistfulness and a nostalgia for golden days past. I’m once again experimenting with the metaphor of clouds as insubstantial fleeting thoughts (first encountered in The Dreamscape Project). Enjoy! MT

This series was shot with a Sony A7RII and Zeiss 1.8/55 FE and 1.8/85 Batis lenses.