I generally only use my camera phone for quick pictures of family and friends in social situations and sometimes to photograph food (though I don’t like doing that in restaurants, generally). But I had an idle few minutes recently sitting out in a public place and I started messing around with the camera on my current phone. To my surprise, it had a “Pro” setting that allowed for a ton of manual control over the images—about the only thing it couldn’t really do was simulate a neutral-density filter over the lens or otherwise artificially darken the viewing field. So I set to experimenting.
Most of the results were meh, partly because I was trying to handhold long exposure shots. But I did end up liking this one image.
It’s another way to solve the problem of photographing strangers in public without being intrusive: long exposures that blur and ghost the humans in them, or in this case, without a filter on the lens, wash most of them out into the overexposure.