photoessay – Ming Thein

Photoessay: Tropical skies

August 6, 2019 by Ming Thein

Dreamlike is probably the best description for this series: evocative of palm trees, sea breezes, long drinks and days of doing not very much. (I wish!) I find more than ever I need a break to disconnect and plan the next move, but there’s less and less time available in which to do so. So the only solution is to at least try to create the same feeling through reviewing images with those subjects – after all, if I’ve done a decent job at the time of capture, I should have managed to freeze and translate the way I felt at the time. And if it doesn’t work for me, then it’s doubtful it’d work for anybody else: but I feel myself relaxing already… MT

This series was shot with a Nikon Z7 and 24-70/4 S. No post processing, just the custom color picture control from the Z7/D850 profile pack…

[Read more…]

Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, nikon z7, photoessay, sky, sunset, thein, tropical

On-assignment photoessay: Monolithic

July 31, 2019 by Ming Thein

There’s something about the visual gravity only the deepest registers the monochrome tonal scale can provide; those zones that make or break a good printer and convey tonal richness and texture. Whilst such work tends to be more the preserve of editorial and fine art photography and less so in commercial, I can’t help myself from seeing such subjects during the course of a cleaner, higher key commercial assignment. There are always structural and physical elements of such massiveness as require these tonal registers to do them justice; I shoot and file them away for later personal satisfaction. Overcast weather may be the bane of most commercial available light work, but it matters not a bit in this case. This particular set is the curation of several assignments; there’s a deliberate change in pace between the images where the monolithic element may be the entire frame, or just a small (but visually heavy) part of it. Or it may be an otherwise light-coloured subject but still somehow that sort of chalky, textured grey… MT

This series was shot with a Nikon Z7, D850, 24-120/4 VR, 70-200/4 VR. No post processing, just the monochrome picture control from the Z7/D850 profile pack…

Photoessay: Tokyo life

July 25, 2019 by Ming Thein

Trying something a little different with the curation this time: think of today’s presentation as a sequence of places visited and a journey rather than a similar collection of images. Note the rhythm of transition between indoors/outdoors; bright/dark; intimate and detached. It is a series of interactions between observer (me) and the environment and people around me; I experienced first and shot second, rather than focusing purely on photography. Trying to put my new approach to travel and image-making into practice… MT

This series was shot with a Nikon Z7, 24-70/4 S and SOOC with my custom Z7 Picture Control profiles.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: life, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, nikon z7, people, photoessay, photography, street, thein, tokyo

Photoessay: Long goodbye

July 19, 2019 by Ming Thein

Something a little different today: curated over a period of time into a narrative area whole bunch of images that actually have little to no actual causality. Rather these are an example of how you can stitch a storyline together by implication alone, and both the power (and misleading danger) of photojournalism with its implicit veracity. That said, I think of today as a series of departures and moving-ons; a mix of melancholy, reminiscence and optimism that tomorrow will be a better day. There is enough ambiguity for you, the audience, to decide how you want to feel. The end can also be the beginning. MT

Shot over a long period of time with a wide variety of hardware.

Photoessay: Pitlane

July 13, 2019 by Ming Thein

A continuation of an earlier post but with the colour removed to focus solely on the homogeneity of the actions of all team members. Fundamentally, there is very little difference in what each team does, but it doesn’t feel that way simply because of the distraction and synchronicity of color and livery. I wasn’t attending on assignment (for a change) and so had the luxury of photographing a little more stream of consciousness and focusing on what was immediately interesting/ outstanding to me… MT

This series was shot with a Nikon Z7, 24-120/4 VR and SOOC with my custom Z7 Picture Control profiles. I elected to go with the 24-120 on the FTZ adaptor instead of the 24-70S and 70-200/4 for a more convenient single lens solution.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photoessay, photography, pitlane, racing, thein

Photoessay: Livery

July 7, 2019 by Ming Thein

Some color and geometry studies in detail from a GT3 race I attended earlier in the year; it’s been a very long time since I went to one of these things without a press pass and a long lens from the end of the field. But I did have pit garage access, which was nice; and compared to higher formulas the whole atmosphere is a bit more relaxed and nobody minds you shooting in the garages too much since the setups are all pretty much identical and there aren’t big dollars spent or at stake (relatively speaking, of course). It’s interesting just how much of the aerodynamic and mechanical details is camouflaged by the team liveries, though – just like all forms of advertising, the endless race to stand out by having ever more striking colours has resulted in a surprisingly homogeneous field where it isn’t easy to distinguish between some teams. It’s even worse when you have to cram a huge number of smaller sponsors on the car instead of one or two large ones. More than once, I had the feeling that I was watching some rather exotic birds of paradise – which I suppose is not a bad analogy for race cars in general… MT

[Read more…]

Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: cars, gt3, livery, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, nikon z7, photoessay, photography, racing, thein

Photoessay: Enter the Abyss

July 1, 2019 by Ming Thein

The most challenging types of watch to design is where there are already rigid expectations set by the genre – pilot, diver etc. – to go outside this requires either not meeting functional requirements, or producing something that takes some acclimatisation by the market. You want to avoid being different simply or the age of being different as this inevitably leads to issues of design longevity/maturity as well as functional compromises. Our interpretation of a dive watch has had the longest and most painful gestation to date – with conceptual explorations starting in late 2017, not long after the 17.01 was launched. It’s taken us nearly two years to make something we were happy with, and in the end – we have also decided not to go to series production because it came too late in the brand’s overall design cycle. Even if we committed now, we wouldn’t see product until the end of next year at the earliest, by which time other launches with our second generation design language would have taken place and leaving the Abyss feeling a bit out of place.

On-Assignment photoessay: gentle curvature

June 25, 2019 by Ming Thein

On some assignments you sacrifice your favourite camera strap, pray to the weather gods to grant you favour and be prepared to shoot everything in a half-hour mad rush around blue hour if it all goes to hell. This was one of those: a last minute call from a long-standing client with barely a 2.5 day deadline to deliver completed, retouched images. Normally I don’t (well, can’t) accept assignments on such short notice, but I happened to have a free day and the subject was quite interesting. The only problem: weather up to that point had been really terrible; one camera strap later and I think we lucked out. All shooting was complete within a 12 hour window – including the night images (done late the previous evening) and aerials (the morning of). Light was good, winds were calm and a couple of aerial stitches were achievable – thankfully, as there was no physical vantage point for the angles the client wanted, and limited aerial vantage due to surrounding buildings and construction cranes. The building itself is quite unusually shaped – there are no real external straight edges which gives it a very strange feeling at ground/podium level, as well as a means to defeat site setback regulations at street level to maximise internal floor space. Not all of it was completed in time, so there was no chance to photograph inside the rooftop glass-roofed area, which judging from the drone – had pretty extraordinary shadows from the window frames and columns. As an aside, I personally found the results much more interesting in monochrome as they brought out key features and played real volumes nicely against projected shadows, but unfortunately those weren’t part of the client brief – perhaps for a future photoessay, though… MT

This series was shot with a Nikon D850, Z7 and DJI Mavic Pro 2 and processed with Photoshop Workflow III.

Photoessay: Objectified

June 10, 2019 by Ming Thein

I admit this set is a bit of a mixed bag. But sometimes we come across objects, things, miniature scene of texture and color that are too good to ignore and too incoherent to fit into any other curation. They’re not really bound together by anything save a transition of color and form; seeing at its most basic. Nothing a client will ever pay for, but you might notice a physical layout or quality of light that might come in useful later; especially if you shoot product or still life. They’re the little serendipitous tributes to light and the kind of thing that to be honest – only photographers and painters really notice or get turned on by. Like well-executed musical scales, the pleasure of execution is for the artist alone. No need to feel guilty, we’re among friends here. MT

This series was shot with a wide variety of hardware over about a year, and mostly post processed with Photoshop Workflow III

[Read more…]

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

Photoessay: Mori

June 4, 2019 by Ming Thein

Welcome to one of the most surreal manmade places you can imagine, in Tokyo, or anywhere (which is saying something): The Mori Digital Art Museum, on Odaiba out in Tokyo Bay. Covering a huge area inside a blackened warehouse hung from floor to ceiling with a velvety material that can be projected on, the entire exhibition is dynamic. Projectors seamlessly cover walls and sometimes floors, combined with motion sensors to interact with the audience to create a very strange simulacrum of nature. It’s almost like stepping into Avatar; the extent of the simulation is so complete you feel very disoriented in some parts (especially those were the floor itself is no longer flat). There are tactile areas (like the giant balloons, or projection lilypads) for the kids, and enough rooms and dynamism that you don’t suffer from deja vu even if you revisit the same location twice (which you inevitably will, because signage is kept to a minimum). To shoot – it’s something else, because you’re basically trying to photograph a highly contrasty and saturated projection across multiple surfaces. And because the images are dynamic – sometimes with serious speed – composition is challenging indeed. It’s also not as bright as it looks, so you’re landing up at very high ISOs to keep the projected images crisp and deal with light levels. Though the environment looks three dimensional, it isn’t; though the other people visiting are three dimensional, they collapse to two dimensional silhouettes because they are nowhere near as bright; in short: the whole thing is surreal. MT

This series was shot with a Nikon Z7, 24-70/4 S and processed with Photoshop Workflow III – I tried using my custom Z7 Picture Control profiles, but they were off base in this strange edge case situation…

[Read more…]

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