It’s time for the second installment in the featured photographer section. This week we have MJ (Michael) Klein, an American photographer who is now living in Taiwan. Michael is the brains behind the popular blog New Hampshire Bushman in Taiwan.

_______

_______

Taken around 17:00 on a rare afternoon when the air was clear enough to see all the way to Taipei city from Bade, about 32 KM distant. That’s Taipei 101 in the distance.

_______

1. What is your general background?

Nomadic! My mother was (among other careers) a professional singer. My father was a Honeywell engineer. I grew up around music, watching my mother on TV sometimes, and playing clubs with her as a young kid. After their divorce I lived with my father who, because of his job, had to move about every 2 years. i went to 5 different Junior High schools and 3 high schools. After high school i went into the music business. I’ve produced, engineered, recorded and mixed probably about 100 albums worth of material from hundreds of artists.

______

2. How long have you been taking photos?

My father had a Polaroid Land Camera in 1959. As soon as I was old enough he taught me how to use it. When I was 12 I had my own pocket flim camera. so I’ve been around photography for all of my life. I began to explore the technical side of processing when I was 17 with darkroom equipment, donated and setup by my father’s Honeywell peers, who were all into photography (back in those days Honeywell had a commercial relationship with Pentax). That same year I took a photography course in High School. I got my first digital camera back in 1997 and it was not very capable! Eventually I worked up to the Nikon Coolpix 5700 in 2002 and most of the photos on flickr.com were taken with that camera. I’ve been digital for 10 years now.

_______

_______

Wind Machines on a Miaoli Beach.

_______

3. What equipment do you use? (This includes computer programs and/or
darkroom equipment).

I currently own a Nikon D80, and a SB-800 speedlight. I have 2 lenses:
18~70mm and 70~300mm. I am going to sell these lenses and purchase a single
lens for the “one camera, one lens” solution approach. I think that would
suit my style better.

I run linux and the current distro that I am using is Kubuntu Feisty Fawn.
the Open Source world has a vast field of image manipulation applications
available and much of it rivals the Mac. Of course I do have a Windows
partition and sometimes I use Windows applications. For model work, I find
that Clean Skin http://www.mediachance.com/digicam/cleanskin.htm is an
excellent application for skin tone enhancement if required. The whole Media
Enhance suite is pretty good in fact. They have some excellent filter
simulation and lighting enhancement applications.

Sometimes I use the Arcsoft suite that came with the Nikon camera for making
panoramas.

I’ve never used Photoshop before. The usual program of choice for linux users
would be The Gimp. The truth is, I don’t do much enhancement to my photos.
I absolutely hate cropping and the only reason I would enhance something
later would be to create a new piece of art from a photograph. I have seen
so many photos on flickr.com and other sites where the colors are clearly
fake and artificially enhanced by Photoshop or some other. I’m not really
impressed with that kind of work, personally. I prefer a more natural
approach. My goal is to get the capture that I want using the camera as much
as possible. That requires attention to composition and lighting. I don’t
like to shoot with the intention of fixing it later.

The application that I use everyday is Digikam. This
linux base application is excellent for managing large volumes of photo files
(I have over 26,000 files).

______

4. What’s your preferred photographic subject(s)? (ie – people, travel,
landscapes etc).

My favorite mode of photography is glamor/beauty and semi-nude, both shooting
and appreciating. I prefer to not shoot a model totally nude however. In my
opinion it retains more of an artistic feeling. I also love
landscape photography and I try to capture landscapes especially when
traveling. Taiwan is such an amazing place for landscapes that it’s easy to
become spoiled by it. Given those 2 subject preferences, whenever I can get
a beautiful woman in front of a landscape, well it doesn’t get any better for
me! In the past I used to do theme work, where I would shoot a model with a
specific theme in mind. One of those themes is to use a woman’s body as the
actual landscape. That idea occurred to me a few year back when I was
looking at a nude photograph and rotated it horizontally. I realized that that
particular model’s body did actually resemble a landscape scene. I never did
fully realize that theme because at the time I couldn’t find a suitable model
for the landscape. Also I needed to find a good artist to paint the mural
and the body to blend. Hopefully I will be able to achieve this theme goal
someday.

______

______

Hui-Chen Portrait

______

5. Do you have a photographic “vision” and what is it?

Hmmmm. not really. At least I don’t think so. Maybe the answer to that
question is found in #7 below.

______

6. Who/What are your photographic influences, if any?

I would say that my main influences are Russian and Japanese photographers, in
general rather than specific individuals. I appreciate the rich, complex
deep aspects of Russian photography, and yet Ii love the straightforward
approach of Japanese photographers. I am a huge fan of
http://www.photosight.ru/

_______

7. How would you describe your photographic style, and how has it evolved
over the years?

My style can be described as “documentary” in nature and approach. For years
I have done industrial photography in the manufacturing field, for the
purpose of documenting processes and recording them for transfer of
technology purposes. I found that I have a good eye for that kind of work
and even when I photograph, say, a model or a landscape, there is a certain
documentary feel in those photographs. You can see this in some of my family
photos on flickr.com. It’s not entirely inartistic, just different than most
styles I think. As you know these days I have a photo blog so admittedly a
great deal of what I shoot on a daily basis is geared toward the blog
readership. Naturally that has to be documentary in nature as I am telling a
story with photos. My doco approach has been useful in the theme work as
well.

I do travel a lot and I tend to shoot a lot of photos, but then again there
tends to be a documentary feel to them. I try to tell a story with my photos
(I suppose that could be my “vision”). It’s not very often that I get an
opportunity to just concentrate on making art. I would like more
opportunities to do that but they don’t often present themselves.

I’ve always been lucky though, being somewhere at the right time to capture an
event. The incident with 5371 is a good example of that. (Editors note – Taiwanese fighter jet ROCAF F-5F 5371 crashed at in airbase in Hukou, Taiwan in May 2007 killing five people. The pilots are regarded as heroes for not bailing out and allowing the jet to come down in the city. Michael’s photos of the last moments were vitally important to the investigators.) Again though, my
reason for being there at that time was to document the military exercises.

______

Eight Arch Bridge, Taidong

______

8. What is your system for backing up digital files?

I have an external 320G drive connected to my notebook via IEEE1493 (Firewire)
for file storage. I have a DVD burner for backing up files.

_______

9. What is your general “workflow” like? (ie – the steps you take after
you’ve taken the shot – organizing, editing, processing etc.

I use a card reader and download files off my data cards
and into the archive using Digikam. With Digikam I am able to geolocate
files, tag them with keywords, insert comments, perform certain batch
operations on groups of photos and keep things very well organized. The one
really excellent thing about Digikam is that it allows one to utilize their
currently existing file hierarchy. Most photographers I know already have a
filing system in place. They would be reluctant to use anything that didn’t
utilize that system. Digikam seems to be the best photo file management
system yet.

I use the Flock browser for uploading to flickr.com and also for blogging. I
couldn’t live without it.

______

10. Do you prefer to shoot RAW or JPG and why?

While Digikam can handle raw files natively, I shoot .jpg files. The reasons
are that since I generally don’t modify files later, I don’t need the files
to be in a lossless format. What little modifications I do can reside in the
jpg domain. The other reason is that often I go places where I don’t have
access to my notebook (or electricity!) for several days at a time. I need
the file saving properites of using the jpg format. My primary memory card is
a 4G SD, and I have a 2G SD for backup. On a typical expedition I will shoot
between 800 and 1,000 shots in 2 or 3 days. I have 3 batteries for the D80
so I can shoot for many days without needing a recharge. I do shoot
in maximum size and quality and my files are about 3MB each on average. So
clearly I need to manage my storage space aggressively if I am at a remote
location. Now, all that being said, if I were going to shoot for a
commercial project I would shoot both RAW and jpg files (the D80 can save
shots in both formats on the fly). For flickr/blogging, the jpg files are
good enough and I don’t have to go through the extra step of converting the
RAW files into jpegs.

______

A Hsinchu Beach

_______

Many thanks for your time and photos Michael.