An Impression of Vivid Sydney

An ICM dragon dance, shot on a phone.

If you have never been to Vivid Sydney, picture this. After dark the whole city centre turns into a giant open air light show. Buildings become canvases, the harbour glows, and crowds drift between glowing installations with their cameras out. For anyone who has not seen it before, especially if you live outside Sydney or outside Australia, it really is a treat. The first time you walk into it, your jaw drops a little.

And then there is the other camp. If you live there, or if you have been every year for a while now, you might quietly think it is a touch boring. I completely understand that feeling, and I do not think there is anything wrong with it. We are simply wired that way. Most of us love to travel, to see new things, to have new experiences, because it lifts us out of the same daily routine. That craving for novelty is exactly why travel photography exists in the first place. New place, new light, new pictures.

But here is where I start to think a little differently as a visual artist. I cannot always fly somewhere new, and honestly I do not want my photography to depend on that. So the question I keep returning to is this: how do I photograph an ordinary or familiar place in a way that still feels fresh to me? Perhaps a different technique? Or a different way of seeing? That is what keeps me curious, and curiosity is what keeps the work alive.

There is a second reason I care about this, and it is a practical one. As a professional photographer, being unique matters enormously. It is not vanity. It is your voice and your signature on the scene. Think about Vivid for a moment. Thousands of people stand in the same spots, point at the same installations, and walk away with almost identical photos. So every time I lift my camera, I ask myself one simple but slightly uncomfortable question: why me? If anyone standing here could make this exact frame, then what am I actually adding? That question is the best filter I know. It pushes me past the obvious shot and toward something that is genuinely mine.

The other thing always on my mind is the theme. The festival is called Vivid for a reason. It is about colour, energy and movement. So rather than documenting each installation cleanly, I wanted to express that idea in my own language. I wanted the photograph to feel like Vivid, not merely to show it.

My choice this time surprised even me. I shot the whole night on a phone. Yes, just a phone, no tripod, no fancy lens. The trick is wonderfully simple. Turn Live Photo on, take the shot, then open it in your photo album and change the effect to Long Exposure. The phone hands you a simulated long exposure, similar in spirit to what a camera produces with a slow shutter. The clever part is what happens underneath. A Live Photo is really a short video, so the phone uses computational photography to stack and blend all of those frames into one image. The final look depends entirely on how you move the phone, and in which direction, during that brief moment of capture.

That movement is the whole game. This is Intentional Camera Movement, or ICM, and on a phone it becomes very playful. The results are abstract. The recognisable buildings dissolve, and what remains are the paths of the lights themselves, streaks and ribbons and swirls of pure colour.

What I love is that the technique quietly borrows from several traditions at once. It has a flavour of light painting, except this time I am not controlling the light, I am controlling the phone. It carries a touch of panning, because sometimes you really do need to follow a moving light to keep its trail clean. And it holds the spirit of multiple exposure, since the phone is layering many frames into one. All of that from a device already living in your pocket.

For me, this firmly belongs to abstract art. I am not trying to give you an accurate record of Vivid Sydney. I am offering you my impression of it, the feeling of standing inside all that light and letting it wash over me. Each frame is a small dance between my hand and the glow in front of me. No two are ever the same, and no one else could make them, because they came from my movement, in my moment.

There is a postscript to that night I did not plan. Back home, scrolling through the frames, something kept moving in the swirls: a shape that coiled and rose. The longer I looked, the clearer it became: a dragon, dancing through the light. I had not set out to photograph one. It simply surfaced from the colour and motion, the way shapes appear in passing clouds.

I think that is the most honest answer to my own “why me?”. Another photographer might have moved the phone and found something else entirely, and that is exactly the point. What rose out of my impressions was a dragon dance, and perhaps that is no accident. I grew up in Hong Kong, where the dragon dance is the heartbeat of every celebration, all colour, energy and movement, the very things Vivid is built on. The festival’s light, passed through my hand and my history, became a creature I have known all my life.

That is how the series found its name: Dragon of Light, eight frames read as one dance, the dragon waking, unfurling, weaving through cloud, and taking flight. I offer the dragon not as something you must see, but as what I saw.

So if Vivid, or any familiar place, has started to feel a little tired to you, I would gently suggest a small experiment. Leave the clean documentary shot to everyone else for one night. Turn on Live Photo, move with intention, and see what your own impression looks like. You never know what might rise out of the glow to meet you, and you might just fall in love with the ordinary all over again.

Dragon of Light