Week commencing 5th January 2026

Trying phone long exposures and ICM with the camera and the phone.

This week the weather has been terrible however I did manage to get out to Winchester last friday with the aim of getting some street images and while there thought that I would try out some I.C.M (Intentional camera movement) as I haven’t really ever tried it.

I found it quite difficult to get my head around as I’ve always been taught that images are meant to be Sharp or movement is to be intentional E.G. if there is a car going past on a road and you pan to follow it you then use a slow enough shutter speed to create motion blur in the image.

I started off using a shutter speed of around 1 second which didn’t have the desired effect so sped it up to 0.5 second which I thought worked better, well until I got it home where I shared it to some trusted friends who gave me the advise that “You can still make out the people in the blur which doesn’t look intentional enough to be I.C.M ” which on reflection I totally agree but I still think the effect looked cool as I managed to create an eye of focus on the ambulance and people in the distance while the blue effect created a lead into the shot as in the image below.

Defiantly one to keep trying out though as it’s great fun to see what effects can be created.

Defiantly one to keep trying out though as it’s great fun to see what effects can be created.

The rest of the week has been waking up for 3am and taking my son into work then coming home and getting a couple of hrs of sleep before getting up for the day job, on the tuesday of doing this I decided to try some motion blur effects In the private car park while it was practically empty with the dedicated phone camera, I use an Oppo Find X3 Neo and the dedicated app allows me to use a “Pro” Mode however the problems started when trying to dial in the exposure I wanted to get a slow enough speed for the effect I thought I wanted, Now I would normally expect the display on the phone to alter and react to the settings I put into the camera apparently I was wrong as after a couple of pure white shots that it wasn’t going to work though I did find a work around, I have the Adobe lightroom app installed which has its own camera but this only has a maximum exposure time of a second but it was good enough to give me the settings that I could input in the dedicated camera app as a good starting point and somewhere to build from.

This shot in the end was shot at ISO 100 F2.5 1/0.5 sec exposure sat in the phone cradle in a very precarious position so as not to get a lot of the dashboard of the car in the frame, I then drove forward at about 5mp and triggered the shutter as a bright light or shop front got closer which gave the resulting effect.

I like the way these have worked and surprised me as to how good the camera on the phone was this lead me unto thinking up the next level up from this…….

I got home from work on Tuesday evening I had bought a small rig phone mount that fits in my hot shoe of my canon that had arrived that day, it has a thread on the bottom which allowed me to attach it to an arca swiss plate this then allowed me to attach the phone to my monopod….Can you guess where this is going? Yes the next morning armed with my phone and monopod I dropped my son off and then went to a quiet part of the car park again but this time stuck the monopod out of the window with the wide camera activated so I could capture the front of the car and the shops.

Below is the set up followed by the end result.

I actually really like the effect this has given and this is going to lead me on use the R6 mk2 and see what I can get with a full frame camera with higher dynamic range and low light control.

Overall from what would of been a fairly non eventful week turned out to be quite good photographically.

This week also held the first Chill and chat live call on the Urban & Street Photography community which went very well and was great to see the members in person and have a good chat,

I also created a challenge on the community which involves choosing a well known Street Photographer, picking one of their images and the aim is to try and replicate it but not copy it but to put your own pin on the shot. I am looking forward to trying this and I have said we should discuss on our next live call on the 24th Jan.

I think that will do for this Blog, I am actually enjoying doing this, I wonder how long it will last lol lol .

If you’ve got to this part well done and thank you so much for taking the time to read this.