Painting Flowers with My Phone at Floriade
This September, a visit to Floriade in Canberra gave me another opportunity to play with intentional camera movement (ICM). I continued using my iPhone 17 Pro Max, capturing Live Photos and applying the Long Exposure effect. The flowers provided plenty of colour to work with, and I loved seeing their familiar shapes turn into soft, abstract forms.
For the basic iPhone operation, please refer to my article in the August 2026 issue of our Chapter e-news. This time, I would like to share a small change in how I moved the phone, and a few thoughts about what ICM continues to teach me.
I placed the phone very close to a flower and used a wide-angle view. Then I moved it slowly from left to right, or from right to left, following a gentle curve around the main subject. A slight turn of the phone accompanied that movement, helping me keep it directed towards the flower while maintaining a roughly similar distance. Imagine the flower at the centre of a circle, with the phone travelling along a short section of its edge. This is the easiest way I can describe the movement. The position and angle of the phone change together as it follows the curve. There is no need to make a complete circle!
The pace matters too. I try to keep the movement gentle and avoid moving too quickly. Working so close to the subject, I want to give myself time to control the gesture. The flower becomes a reference point around which I move, even as its appearance changes in the resulting image. I really love the abstract, painterly effect. In these photographs, petals spread into soft fans, colours overlap, and stems become flowing marks. Some flowers remain quite recognisable; others begin to dissolve into their surroundings. Seeing the photographs together, I enjoy how the different colours share a similar sense of movement.
My post-processing was limited. In some areas, the movement patterns looked inconsistent with the rest of the photograph. I used Content-Aware Fill in those areas on a separate layer, then blended the filled layer with the original. I usually reduced the filled layer's opacity to around 50–70%. This allowed some of the original image to remain visible through the filled areas. My aim was to soften the distracting inconsistencies while keeping a natural sense of irregularity. That was the extent of the editing. I made no further adjustments to contrast, saturation or clarity. I was happy with the colours and softness already there.
The experience brought me back to something I increasingly value about ICM: uncertainty. I cannot predict exactly how every petal or stem will appear, and that is part of the attraction. There is room for surprise, even when I approach the next photograph with a similar movement in mind. At the same time, I want to develop enough control to create a consistent feeling across a series. That means practising how I move the phone and learning to recognise the kinds of marks those movements produce. Speed, direction and the shape of the gesture all become things to pay attention to. For me, this is where an artistic voice begins to develop. Individual photographs can differ while still feeling connected. The challenge is to become familiar enough with my movements to give the work that connection, while leaving space for something unexpected. This balance between uncertainty and intention is what I want to keep practising.
ICM also reminds me that art needs to be playful. I think of using a camera as a little like playing a game. We can learn its rules, understand how the equipment works and enjoy what we can achieve within that framework. There is plenty to explore there. We can also question the usual ways of doing things, challenge them and develop rules of our own. The equipment still operates as it does, but we can experiment with how we use it. Deliberately moving the phone opens up possibilities that would be easy to miss if keeping everything steady were always the aim.
Jacky Lee is a photographic artist based in Canberra, born in Hong Kong, with thirty years behind the camera. He works in Intentional Camera Movement and named two methods within it, Intentional Focus Movement and Intentional Parallax Movement. He chairs the AI & Authorship Standards Subcommittee of the Australian Photographic Society, and is an Ambassador of the International Association of Art Photographers for 2026.
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