Urban Impressionism

Six hours in Sydney, three seconds at a time

Many of you will know I live in Canberra. Fewer will know that I have a half-year rail pass, and that once a month or so I take the train up to Sydney for the day, usually on my own, though not this time. The timetable is unforgiving: I arrive around 11am and must be back on a train by 5pm, which leaves me about 6 hours.

When I have a particular photograph in mind I will plan a trip around it in detail; this was not one of those days. I left it open and followed the moment, which I have come to enjoy more than I expected. The job was to notice something worth photographing before the clock ran out.

The previous evening, the choice came down to the Fujifilm GFX 50S with a 17mm f/4 prime, or the phone in my pocket anyway. I like to work at one fixed angle of view when making a series, since that is what holds a set together; the phone has 3 lenses, but I tend to stay on one of them for the same reason. Other commitments kept me up late regardless, and I had perhaps 2 hours’ sleep. Tired in the morning, and not wanting the weight on my shoulder, I left the Fujifilm at home.

I would like to claim that was a considered artistic decision. Mostly it was fatigue. But there was something underneath it: I have been studying Intentional Camera Movement for a year or so, and I wanted to see how far a phone could be pushed.

Waiting outside a shop

Nothing much happened for the first few hours. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, I found myself standing in the street while my wife was shopping, with nothing to do but look.

Light and shadow shifting across the sky, the lines of the buildings running away from me, the ordinary traffic of people along the footpath. I cannot properly explain the jump my mind made next. I have studied Monet only a little, but the style of his painting surfaced in my head unbidden, and seemed to match what was in front of me. Everything here came out of the 30 minutes that followed.

A camera that never stops looking

I have carried an iPhone since the 4S, so about 15 years, and Live Photos has been there for most of them: Apple introduced it with the 6s in September 2015. I barely touched it. What I wanted from a phone was resolution, which on my 17 Pro Max means 48 megapixels in ProRAW, and the two are mutually exclusive. Switch ProRAW on and Live Photos is not available at all. It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out what I had been turning down.

With Live Photos enabled, the phone is not waiting for you to press the shutter. It is already recording, holding a rolling buffer of what the lens can see. Press the button and it keeps the 1.5 seconds that have already happened, plus the 1.5 that follow.

Three seconds, then, and in them a short video track running alongside the still. Apple has published very little about it, and independent measurements have found frame rates anywhere from 15 to nearly 30 a second, so the honest answer is a range: somewhere between 45 and 90 separate exposures of the same scene. Not a blur. A burst.

Swipe up on a Live Photo in the Photos app and one of the options is Long Exposure, which blends every frame in that window into a single still. No extra software, nothing stacked by hand. Everything here was made that way. An ordinary photograph on my phone is 24 megapixels; the blended result comes back at about 20, which prints on canvas at 100 dpi to roughly 1.3 metres wide. It arrives slightly cropped and visibly softer than the original still, but for a picture made entirely of blur there is little detail to lose.

An intersection of ICM and image stacking

This is the part I found most interesting, and I may still have some of it wrong.

Drag a conventional camera through a 2-second exposure and the shutter stays open the whole time. A bright edge, whether a window frame, a tram wire or the lit rim of a building, traces one continuous path across the sensor, and the result is smooth.

A Live Photo behaves differently. It is not one exposure but dozens of short ones laid over one another. Each frame is open only briefly, but swing the phone fast enough and even that instant will smear what it sees. So every frame carries a little blur of its own, and the frames are displaced from one another as well. What comes out is neither a long exposure nor a plain burst, but an intersection of the two: intentional camera movement and image stacking at the same time.

Look closely at the overhead wires and you can see it: not one soft band but a comb of distinct strands. The same signature runs through the buildings, that faint woven texture across the sandstone and brick. Those are the individual frames, made visible, and not something a single continuous exposure would give you.

Moving the phone

Composition still matters more than anything else, and it was the part that took me longest to solve. Moving the camera does not excuse you from framing the picture; it only makes the job harder, because the frame you want has to survive being averaged with everything else in those 3 seconds.

What I do now is this. I settle on the composition I actually want. From there I move the phone away along the building lines and back to it, twice over, which takes roughly the first 1.5 seconds. Then I press the shutter and hold that frame still for about half a second. Then I move off again in a different direction for the remaining second or so.

Because the phone has already been recording, all of that lands in the file. Look carefully at these pictures and you will see not one movement but two. And because the camera rested on the intended composition for half a second in the middle, it carries more weight in the blend than anything else, so the finished picture still honours it.

Lee Street and Thomas Street No. 3, Sydney, 2026, from Sydney Streets.

Most of these were taken on the ultra-wide, a 13mm equivalent, which is almost exactly the angle of view of the 17mm I use on the Fujifilm. What matters is keeping the framing broadly consistent across the set, because the set is meant to be read as one body of work. Where I did switch to the main lens, at a 24mm equivalent, I kept the composition close enough that the change does not announce itself.

One thing worth knowing. The phone can shorten a Live Photo of its own accord, analysing the capture and trimming it to avoid recording excess movement; Apple says this is the same behaviour the Camera app uses, and the example it gave in 2016 was dropping your arm to put the phone in your pocket. There is no user setting to switch it off. Whether deliberate movement provokes the same trimming is not documented and I have not measured it, but my most energetic attempts do seem to come back with the shortest trails.

Afterwards

The blending is done by the phone, but what comes out of it is flat, and the picture is not finished there. It takes me around 10 minutes to find the balance: localised Clarity first, since that is what rescues the striations from mush, then Vibrance, Contrast, Colour and Tone, tried against one another until the thing feels right.

Why I bother

Urban impressionism is what I am after: not the appearance of a street, but the impression it left, which is what I actually carry home from a day like that.

The first thing that keeps me at it is that I would like photography to be a little less about equipment, though that evening of deliberating suggests I do not always live up to it. For work like this a phone is not a compromise; the computational photography inside it is remarkable.

The second took me much longer to arrive at. I have been photographing since the 1990s, and for most of that time what we all chased was sharpness. It is a good discipline and I do not regret the years I gave it. But for expressive work sharpness is not the point. Feeling is, and a picture can carry a great deal of feeling without being sharp anywhere at all.

The third is the one I would most like to pass on. I am drawn to finding something extraordinary in ordinary places, and there are many ways in: how closely you observe, when you choose to be there, what you happen to be carrying, which technique you reach for, what you do afterwards. Any of them can turn a street you have walked a dozen times into something you have not seen. Making the invisible visible is how I think of it, and it seems to me both the responsibility and the pleasure of being a photographer.

Making photographs also makes me feel better, and I have come to think that matters more to me than whatever ends up on the wall. It is the direction I want to take my own work. Six hours, a phone in my pocket, and an ordinary street: it turns out that is enough.