photography – Ming Thein

Composition is not independent of exposure

August 21, 2015 by Ming Thein

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Here’s a non-obvious thought: composition should be linked to exposure. On the face of it, this does not make any sense at all: how can something which is a technical property of the camera (exposure) control what we do with an artistic and subjective (composition) one? There are two things we need to take into account here. Firstly, our eyes and our cameras work differently, so there will be some gaps in translation. Secondly, photography – composition and all – still ultimately boils down to light, since a photograph is nothing more than a record of luminance, color and spatial position in two dimensions. The starting position is what changes the appearance of the recording even if everything else in the scene is static.

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Filed Under: Articles, On Photography Tagged With: article, essay, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, opinion, photography, thein

Photoessay: Urban isolation

August 17, 2015 by Ming Thein

The big C

Today’s photoessay is not quite varied Idea of man so much as man overwhelmed – we construct these grandiose environments for ourselves to use, but then land up almost being slave to them. It’s a slightly odd state of affairs in which I feel the human gets rendered somewhat irrelevant and overwhelmed. Who is the real master? Where did we lose control? MT

This series was shot in various places with various equipment (mostly a D810) and curated over a long period of time.

A concise city guide for photographers – updated!

August 13, 2015 by Ming Thein

Updated from the 2012 version: my concise city guide for photographers. I’ve added many cities to the list since the first edition, and things have of course changed. This guide is a shortlist of places I’ve been to personally that I think are worth visiting as a photographer, places to be avoided, and places if you like a challenge… It’s organized by city, in alphabetical order. Name links lead you to any other posts tagged from that location – usually photoessays – to help you get a better idea of what to expect. Certain destinations also have a vicarious travel/photographic guide in the form of a How To See episode – links for those are included, too. MT

The fuss about fifties

August 11, 2015 by Ming Thein

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It seems there are perhaps as many roads to Rome as there are 50mm lenses and their approximate equivalents – these are just some of the examples I’ve owned and/or used in the last five years, and is by no means extensive. Off the top of my head, missing are the ubiquitous Nikon 50/1.4, which I’ve owned in three versions; the 55/1.2 pre-AI; the 50/2.8 Micro-Nikkor; the Leica 50/2 Summicron; the Hasselblad CF 4/50 FLE, the Pentax 645 55/2.8 SDM – I could find images of these lenses I’d shot previously – and we haven’t even talked about other brands or extending the envelope downwards, to say 45mm or equivalents in other formats (e.g. 25mm on M4/3, or 35mm on APSC). So why the fascination with and proliferation of lenses around this range?

Photoessay: Silent in Kuala Lumpur

August 9, 2015 by Ming Thein

Urban environments are characterised by people: creators, masters, users. They are odd when empty simply because they were never intended to be empty. What is left can be whatever you want it to be; sinister, lonely, a mere abstraction of form and color. Sometimes I wonder about the whole creative circle underlying these locations and objects: somebody had to design and make them, and they had to find the inspiration from somewhere else. We then in turn find something of interest in their forms – but probably not what the original creator intended, especially when taken in concert with environment and other unplanned or juxtaposed objects. Or perhaps I’m thinking too much. Make of these what you will…MT

This series was shot over a period of time with a wide variety of hardware and processed with the fine art technique in Making Outstanding Images Ep.5.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: kuala lumpur, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, photoessay, photography, still life, thein, urban

Photoessay: Prague nightscapes

August 5, 2015 by Ming Thein

Not your typical postcard

Today’s photoessay is a series off nightscapes from Prague. I’ve always found night photography requires a bit of an ‘inertial hump’ to get over – especially if you’re out hauling the tripod for some long exposures; there’s an optimum window just after dusk when the sky is a dark blue and not totally black, balancing off with the ambient illumination of the buildings. It means you have to carefully plan your locations and/or route in order to be at the right place at the right time; on top of that, I find the actual shooting window is pretty small – perhaps two hours at best unless you’re living at extreme latitudes in summer.

Photoessay: Details of a forest

August 1, 2015 by Ming Thein

Explosion

Perhaps this set should have been called ‘seeing the wood for the trees’ – often in a situation where there is so much going on, it’s not easy to pick out and compose for individual details. There’s a sort of cognitive deception going on – there appears to be a lot of areas of interest, but in reality you’ve got to be very careful because it’s really the juxtaposition and perceived density that makes the scene interesting – without the context, you don’t know it’s one tree of many, or that the level of detail continues on to increasingly smaller scales, or that a particular rock formation is out of place. A good rule of thumb is that the detail of interest must be markedly different from the surrounding areas in order to stand out and hold audience attention. That of course means including the surrounding areas…

Photoessay: Abstract rocks of Hruba Skala

July 28, 2015 by Ming Thein

Hrubá Skalá is a tiny little village around a castle, located in the Český Ráj (Bohemian Paradise) area of the Czech Republic. It’s about an hour or so north of Prague and very much in the countryside; farmhouses there change hands for EUR 20,000 or thereabouts. It also contains some of the most interesting rock formations on earth – a mixture of limestone and sandstone towers in fantastic shapes that remained whilst the surrounding soil eroded away. In places they protrude out of the forest forming a cliff line; in others they are so near to each other that canyons which never see any light are formed. Walking between them is quite otherworldly – not just because of their scale, but because you pretty much have the place to yourself.

Photoessay: People of Venice

July 24, 2015 by Ming Thein

A touch of longing

Today’s photoessay is perhaps best thought of a series of vignettes of the locals living in Venice – there may be one or two tourists that got caught in the mix, but I doubt most of them would buy raw meat at the butcher’s. There was a deliberate effort on my part to exclude people who were obviously tourists and focus on individuals; that wasn’t actually too difficult since it was a) winter and b) I was in many of the neighbourhoods that pretty much only saw residents. Those who attended my Venice Masterclass in November 2014 may recognise some of these images from the final day’s curation and processing session; in fact, you might even have been there at the time of capture… Enjoy! MT

This series was shot with a Ricoh GR, 21mm converter, 645Z and 55/2.8 SDM and processed with a mixture of PS workflow II and the ‘fine art’ style in Making Outstanding Images Ep.5: Processing For Style.

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Filed Under: On Photography Tagged With: 645z, life, ming, ming thein, mingthein.com, people, photoessay, photography, reportage, thein, venice

Repost: Defining cinematic

July 22, 2015 by Ming Thein

Given we’re in the first day of the Cinematic Masterclass with Zeiss in Hanoi, it seems only appropriate that I bring back this classic post for another round – with new images, of course!

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