It’s been a few months since I last posted but I’m seeing light at the end of the tunnel.  In the process I’ve gained many new clients and friends.  Now that the work is pretty much caught up I now have time to enjoy my hobby again, photography.

I’d like to share some Christmas humor with a few quotes from a photographer I admire.

Ming Thein   

Take the time to read a few of them, I’m sure you’ll get a chuckle out of least a few of them if you’re living and breathing photography at least a little bit.

Enjoy! 

Merry Christmas,

Roger Lee

You know you’re a real photographer if

…cameras rank above clothes on your holiday packing list; you’d gladly go cold or wear the same jeans for a week if it means you can fit in another lens/ tripod/ gigapan/ etc.

…you look at the egg holder slots in your fridge and think, ‘hey, they’d make for great film storage…’

…your fridge has more film than food in it

…none of the film has expired, but all of the food has

…the weather forecast is 1/60s f2 ISO 200 instead of ‘rainy’.

…your favourite times of the day are sunrise and sunset.

…your tripod costs more than your car, and you’re thinking of getting another one ‘just in case’

…a ‘whale tail’ isn’t something you find on a marine mammal

…’Linhof’ is not a type of cheese.

…a red dot on something doesn’t mean it’s cheaper or on sale, to the contrary: it costs significantly more instead.

…you live in a tropical country but choose not to tint your car because the film degrades optical quality ever so slightly, in the even that you want to take a picture out of the window. Even if it’s just with your phone.

…gold boxes make you excited.

…Paypal upgraded your personal account to a merchant one because of all the buying you do off eBay and forums…

…you harbour a secret desire to be caught candid on Tokyo Camera Style, if you happen to be visiting Tokyo.

…you actually think about what camera you’d like to be caught with on Tokyo Camera Style.

…you look for exif data in adult images.

…you run your iPhone images through ACR and Photoshop

…you use keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop at the same speed you type normally

…you carry at least one camera at all times. And you know how to use it.

…you keep a spare camera/ battery/ tripod/ lens/ compact/ roll of film in your car

…you have more bags than your partner

…your partner just sighs and starts posing for you automatically when you bring home a new piece of equipment

…your partner can’t tell the difference between one piece of equipment and the next because you’ve got so much of it

…you have more memory cards than free hard drive space

…you ask if a car you’re interested in buying can carry a golf bag because it’s about the same size as your lighting bag

…umbrellas only come in two forms: bounce and shoot-through

…you select your spectacle lenses because they have a high T stop, low flare and low chromatic aberration

…you own all the adaptors necessary to mount any lens you own to any body you own, regardless of whether they are actually usable in practice or not

…you select your seat anywhere – a restaurant, an airplane, the park – based on the direction of light and the ambient composition in front of you

…you select your flights based on the light at that time of day and what the route probably flies over

…your wardrobe has a high component of black or white garments so you can control reflections

…those black or white garments are color-neutral and grey balanced

…poor lighting design at restaurants bothers you more than poor food

…seeing somebody use instagram to replicate an effect that’s actually a mistake, like cross-processing, makes you want to choke them with their phones

…the compression and colour gamut of Facebook bother you more than their draconian IP policy

…coffee is good for two things: making caffenol developer, and keeping you awake while you use the caffenol developer

…you really don’t want to date a model

…you don’t wear your wedding ring because it interferes with your manual focusing ability

…and your wife doesn’t give you hell for it

…you buy micro fibre t-shirts because they can also be used as lens cloths

…your micro fibre t-shirts have little holes at the bottom where the filter threads of your lenses cut through the material whilst you were using them as a lens cloth…

…you own an enlarger and you’re proud of it

…you look at the phone numbers 1-424-247-070 ext 200 or 1-635-247-028 and get excited

…on negotiating a taxi fare, the driver offers to use the meter. You reply ‘real pros don’t need a meter son, we use our eyeballs.’

…White Balance is not a political movement

…when an evangelist says the Trinity changed their lives, you ask if they went with the 14-24 or 17-35 for the wide end

…you dump your partner because they’re Nikon and you’re Canon or vice versa, and the two beliefs simply cannot coexist peacefully.

…when you overhear a colleague saying they’re taking Delta flight 100 on vacation, you suggest they might also like to try Acros or TMAX

…you go out of your way to photograph things other people specifically go out of their way to avoid: riots, extreme weather, wars, plagues, zombies…

…one day, you and some friends are discussing what constitutes emergency survival kit. You try to convince them a camera is an absolute must, then spend the rest of the evening in internal turmoil because you can’t decide if it should be digital or entirely mechanical and film, and if so, how much of which film to bring.

…you get motion sickness in a moving vehicle unless you’re shooting from it, then the motion is just annoying because it causes blur

…you can’t stand the sight of blood but would kill for the opportunity to photograph a live surgery, because that’s just awesome

…you look at hipstagram images and it annoys you that people choose the fake frame with ‘RVP100′ in the margins, but the image is faded and faux-vintagey-looking

…there’s at least one plain wall in your house to use as a backdrop

…your walls have no photographs hung because you can’t decide which ones deserve to be up there forever

…a random person asks you to take their photograph at a tourist site, and by the time you give the camera back to them, you’ve completely reconfigured it to your preferences and they can’t figure out how it works anymore

…a random person asks you to take their photograph at a tourist site, you take a look at their camera, and instead offer to take one with yours and email it to them

…random people at tourists sites always ask you to take their photograph because you’re the one carrying the most camera gear, ergo, you should know what you’re doing

…the photographer you fear/ respect/ loathe/ stalk/ are inspired by the most is the little ninja dude in the corner with the point and shoot or phone whom you never actually see shooting, but somehow produces the most amazing images you’ve ever seen

…you think 100mm is a long lens for shooting a pride of wild lions (sorry Nick!)

…you see a place through your viewfinder, not through your eyes

…you think about buying a 4K UHDTV just to view images on…in the long run, it’d be cheaper than printing, right?

…a ‘baryta’ is not the person who makes your coffee in Mexico

…you buy furniture that you think will photograph well, it doesn’t really matter if it’s comfortable to sit on or not

…mismatched fluorescent lightbulbs really bother you because it plays havoc with your white balance

…you are late to the opening night of your own exhibition not because you’re trying to be fashionable, but because you couldn’t decide which camera to bring

…you own an editing tablet

…you own more than one editing tablet, to match the size of your screen

…your editing tablet is so well-worn that by looking at which portions of it are shiny and reflective, you can tell where your Photoshop palettes are and if you’re left or right handed

…you can’t watch a movie with a camera in it and not be irritated at an existential level by the way it’s being handled

…you own a piece of plastic or other object that’s perfectly neutral grey under every lighting condition

…on a first date, you’re more interested in whether she/ he would look better photographed with a 50 or 85mm lens

…you know what licensing is

…it takes you longer to decide which cameras to bring on vacation than where to go in the first place

…A, C, E, F, G, K, L, M, P, R, S, T, X, Y are not just letters of the alphabet but have optical significance attached to them…

…’stock’ is not a soup base

…when you talk about the sums of money you spend with your ‘regular dealer’, people get a little concerned about you

…you get nostalgic at the smell of different films

…you get nostalgic at the smell of fixer

…you have brown fingertips from handling too much fixer

…you have cancer of the fingers from handling waaay too much fixer

…you watch an F1 race and the lolly pop man reminds you of a giant dodge and burn wand

…lolly pops remind you of dodge and burn wands

…souping up in the kitchen has nothing with anything that’s actually edible. Or soup, for that matter.

…Marissa Mayer’s statement about professional photographers insulted you.

…but her decision to use an overaggressive sharpening algorithm for downsizing on Flickr insulted you more.

…you can wake up at 5am for sunset sunrise but you can’t wake up at 7am for the daily commute

…you get an itchy shutter finger if you haven’t shot for a day or two

…your shutter finger has a callous on it right at the point you hit the release

…your cameras have names

…’the local’ is a not a bar/ pub, but a lab/ printer/ camera store/ rental house/ studio…and they save a seat for you!

…you get a sickie off your day job on Friday not because of laziness but so you can shoot a three day assignment over the weekend

…you don’t want to learn how to dive because you can’t afford a proper underwater housing

…’blimps’ in your world aren’t capable of flight

…you’ve seen and remember that photograph of the 70s-looking dude on a golf course in shorts with twelve cameras, none of them with lenses under 300mm, and one bazooka/ antitank weapon/ nuclear warhead/ 1200mm lens over his shoulder

…you think that flashing somebody is perfectly acceptable in public or polite company

…you think nothing of sticking an enormous threatening-looking tube in somebody’s face, then making machine-gun noises with it, smiling and walking away

…somebody asks you to recommend a camera, and eventually they fall asleep because your answer is too long

…somebody asks you to recommend a camera, and you ask them ‘how long is a piece of string?’

…somebody asks you to recommend a camera, and you tell them any camera will do, it’s the photographer that makes the difference

…somebody asks you to recommend a camera, and you send them a bunch of referral links

…somebody asks you to recommend a camera, and you suggest the most expensive thing you can find just to see if they’ll buy it

…somebody asks you to recommend a camera, and you try to sell them yours so you can upgrade

And the number one reason: you’re reading my site!

This photo was taken in bright direct sunlight.  I know, very harsh generally not pleasing conditions.  But given time constraints due to her schedule I was able to knock the contrast down with a silver reflector bouncing light on the left side.  Thai style lighting used, whitening the skin a little with the silver.  One would be hard pressed to notice any hint of harsh lighting, courtesy of using the reflector.  Processed in DPP correcting the white balance there and then converting to TIFF and then further processing in Photoshop CS6.  There I adjusted the levels, vibrance, and contrast, finishing with the Portrait Professional plug-in.

Som is a busy business woman in Jomtien, Thailand.  She owns and manages 2 condominium buildings, a salon & massage business, and three bars.  She is the proud mother of two daughters and a son.