Wishing for the 75mm f/1.8 M. Zuiko

I happened to be in Kuala Lumpur when Olympus Malaysia and the PEN Lovers Facebook group organised a hands on lens and modelling session (hands on the lens, ahem, hands off the ahem, models). Lots of people from the blogosphere and social community to meet and shake some hands.

Robin Wong, Luke Ding, Ming Thien, Aizuddin Danian, Raja Indera Putera. The stalwarts of the PEN Lovers group, Koon Yik, Yeow Chin Liang, Mun Keat and many good friends.

And a second encounter with the fab lens. People read words and jump to judgements. Is it too long (in focal length)? Is it too expensive? Well, it’s not full frame so the bokeh blur is not as smooth as a full frame lens. And so on.

Spend some time with the lens and you won’t want to give it back.

Life with a prime

I didn’t use a prime (fixed focal length) lens until early year, as my general, everyday use lens. Digital saw me with a 3x zoom on the Nikon 775 compact cam and then a 10x zoom on the Olympus C-750uz ultra zoom, then the 5x zoom on the Kodak P880. When I went digital, I had the two kit lenses on my E-510 and the story continued.

This year, David Williams introduced me to the 20mm f/1.7 Lumix pancake (40mm in old coin, film parlance) and 45mm f/1.8 Zuiko Digital (90mm in old coin). And I fell for these lenses. I wanted a shallower depth of field like in the film days plus more chance to take shots in dimmer light levels.

I fit the 20mm a lot – it allows closer camera distance, in fact, it forces a closer camera distance. And I switch over to the 45mm when I want some distance from the subject, when I have the space to back away or when I want to frame a tighter portrait.

Beginners to photography often gasp and say “What can I do without a zoom? I can’t live without one. Walking backward and forward isn’t an option I want to take or I have”. To that, I have to reply – what is impossible or immutable is only a state of mind, not an actuality of circumstances.

The honest gaze of sincere friend Kuan – we’ve known each other since University and now we’re apart except for the annual visit but we still find lots in common

The cup of Malaysian coffee is very important – after all, it’s a coffee shop. I didn’t develop a taste of habit for any kind of coffee. We used to have those old carved wood stools and marble seats, it’s been plastic chairs and melamine tables for a long while now. You’ve got to give the coffee a good stir of course, with the overflow dripping down the sides of the cup, otherwise it’s not authentic. The mouth expression in anticipation of before the event or savouring the taste afterwards.

The mahjong boys are back in town. Mahjong can be a gambling addiction and also a generational family and community pastime. Players and onlookers gaze in concentration and exclamations of animation abound when some event happens. Notice the half tiled wall (to save costs) and the unburied wire running (used to be stapled onto bulky wood runners, the modernisation brought PVC conduits. But then again, you could just run it along the wall.

The stand fan provides a breeze and if you are attired in a singlet, well that’s tropicalised wear for you.

Life goes way too fast in the concrete city staffed by Twenty-Somethings. It’s all hustle and bustle and winning the rat race except there are huge number of rats in the race.

When you’ve had your day in the sun, what you yearn for a nice tasty bowl of Yong Tau Foo. The slower you stir, the slower time passes, or so it seems. You can almost see some glimpses of past splendour and activity in the ripples and the reflections.

We close with a note to people who make such food happen. The lady below is peeling mengkuang otherwise known as Yam Bean. It’s good eaten raw, crunchy like an apple except that it is a root, not a fruit. It’s also the sweet taste in poh piah and joo hoo char

And, at the end of the day, we need money to survive. To keep the fridge stocked and running.

In the photos above, we’re not talking about action shots, urgent 5 frame per second shooting. These subjects are evocative, story telling. Yes, some of these shots are indeed cropped and a zoom might avoid that. But a zoom would, for the same price be darker, bigger, more clumsy – with these primes, you can make like you’re fiddling with your camera instead of framing up a shot.

Memories of Dad

I’m here in Malaysia, where it all began so many years ago. And where I last saw Dad before his last rush to hospital. We’ve visited his resting place in Nilai a few times and it is peaceful there but that’s not what I preserve in my heart and my mind.
We used to go to Pudu wet market, we did.

Mum used to do all the heavy lifting – trudge into the wet places to buy chicken, eggs, meat and so on. The women of the household still do that. They used to wear local clogs and later on plastic washable sandals and they still do that.

Dad and I would wait in the cleaner areas and indulge in his passion for fruit – he was the gatherer of the fruits. I went to the place where we bought bananas and they still sell bananas there, but I don’t know the people, old or new.

It’s a darker corridor and there are side entrances

There were lots of things inside the dim market but as Mum did all the main shopping, I didn’t see the veil lifted. Shallots, spices and eggs.
There would be fish.
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And meatier stuff – curiosities like Pigs Ears.

If we stepped outside, we’d see all kinds of stuff on sale. Just because it’s a wet market doesn’t mean you only sell bloody meat or things that make you go Eeeuuww.

Flowers in garlands

As we walked back to the fringe, we would pass this Taoist worship ornaments shop

The shops by the road that sell fish are still there

Then Mum would still not have turned up. We would wait some more and see peddlars with fake Rolex watches (Dad always wanted a real one but settled for two Tissot in his life, he was realistic – his had a family to feed and two sons to send oversas to Uni on government officer salary). He would reward my patience with two types of Chinese pancakes – the thick and the thin types.
And sometimes, sometimes, I would catch a glimpse of something potentially scary and intriguing. The slaughter of a big lizard, turtle – often in a manner that might bring the RSPCA. Those days are gone of course, all you can see are frogs

The market is still full of wide eyed kids

and their Dad

And people who take might have the advantage of wide eyed adults

And that, is what memories of Dad and our time together is.

Thanks Robin Wong, Luke Ding, Yeow Chin Liang and all the gang for hosting the walk. And a hello to Mithun

What is it?

We sometimes come across beginners to photography who don’t “get it” as often as we come across newbies who take to photography like ducks to water.

1. What makes a person not get it?
2. What does not getting it mean? How does one tell? Obviously, the person who doesn’t get it is the one who can’t tell….
3. How does one help someone see the light?
4. Can you not get it and still enjoy photography?

Ming Thein on PetaPixel wrote an insightful article on Common Photographic Mistakes. For beginners he cites:

• The missing subject
• Poor perspective use
• Being stuck in the wrong gear

But why do they do that? We know that’s what they do but why do some people do that? It is sometimes difficult for a veteran to time shift back to the days when the camera was new and experience was low.

The Missing Subject

If the subject is missing, the following could be the reasons:

• The mind might already have taken the subject as a “given” – i.e. the photographer has already sighted, understood the subject but is unaware that the guest viewers have no pre-bonding and association with the subject. For example the subject could be so small in the scene and indistinguishable from the background that everyone else can see this issue except the photographer.
• The photographer is not comfortable with camera settings and thus there is so much focus on settings and the camera, that the subject becomes completely secondary.
• The photographer is trying to juxtapose elements of the scene – that tree, that road, that leading line or pattern that the subject is visually forgotten.

Bottom line: Understand what the subject is, understand that often (guidelines are made to be broken) there is really only one primary subject and everything else is story  telling and decoration (which are not unimportant, but they enhance the subject, they do not replace it).

Poor Perspective Use

Perspective with regard to the subject requires that the photographer first identify what the primary subject is and be aware that taking a photo of the subject means actually visualising what aspects of the subject – top, bottom, left side, right side, behind, overview, close-in the photographer needs to story tell.
Or rather, the difference between a photo that says “this is a picture of a man cleaning his glasses” and a photo that says “this is celebrity A cleaning his glasses in a thoughtful way as he muses on whether he should take the high road or low road” is based on story telling and perspective is part of the story telling.
You have to discover perspective. You have to move your feet with perspective and bend your knees and your waist and you neck up or down, side to side. Even if you have a zoom.
It’s way to easy for any photographer, beginner or veteran, to point the camera at the subject, optionally adjust the zoom and think “yup, that’s the shot, let’s do this”.
Way too often, we miss a much more awesome shot by just adjusting our position.
Cropping after the fact is sometimes the only technique we have to get the look that we want, but that’s an afterthought, and getting it right upstream often yields a technically higher quality image and potentially a visually more appealing angle.

Being stuck in the wrong gear

The camera not giving us the image when we click is the most common and annoying primary issue with all photographers – newbie or veteran. Why can’t all this high tech get into our head and just “make it so” like Jean Luc Picard would enunciate?
Actually, with the passing of each year, the tech is getting there. If you are not convinced, get your hands on a match needle film SLR of the yesteryear, shoot some shots in the city of people walking around pointing into the shadow in one shot, subsequently into the bright sun in another. Use a zoom lens with variable max aperture and it complicates it even more. Use transparency film with the classic lack of tolerance of exposure stuff ups, use manual focus lenses.
Then come up and use a modern DSLR camera with automatic smart scene detection, autofocus and do the same gig and see what happens to the number of relevantly exposed, correctly focussed shots.
It’s already there.
However, it isn’t what we expect still, because we raise our expectations every year. And we expect to shoot the human form against the sun and expect the camera to know whether we want a black silhouette or commendable flesh tones. – like as-if.
And if you came in from an auto everything camera phone or point and shoot compact, you expect the more expensive, purpose built camera to be whatever you were using, just more better.
Really to be successful in re-creating a dish you bought take away from an excellent food outlet, you can’t say to your food replicator “make it so"  - even in the notionally Utopian Star Trek, the food replicators need to be programmed to produce specific food. The same with setting up the camera to take a shot.

1. You must visualise the shot
2. You must de-construct the shot into the controllable elements
3. You must figure out what techniques and settings in camera, in the lens choice and potentially in post processing, to re-construct the shot.

Food for thought.