At the market

I must have read about it by chance a few years ago: Average Camera Pro is a small but delightful iOS application that takes many photos (from 1 to 128), a short time apart (like one second) and then combines them together. It is made, says the developer who designed it, to 'produce images with little noise in low light situations'. He also says that 'because of the long exposure time, you shouldn't hold your iPhone in your hands, but lean it against something to get sharp results'.

And it's true: you should always lean against something to take long exposures: excerpt from photography lesson number 0.

But what happens if I break the rule? What happens if, while the app is taking pictures, I move the phone around or move the phone in my hand? Spoiler: what happens is that the app eventually 'calculates the average image from these [photos taken] and normalises the result'.

The result is photos in which movement emerges, but in a way, it seems to me, that is fractional, sampled, and at the same time exciting, almost as if the photo was taken with the emotion of the moment, rather than what is in front of the lens.

This is one of the first photos taken in this way: I was at the market, took my phone out of my pocket and walked between two rows of stalls.

On my phone, these photos here, I keep them all in an album called average photos: because the app combines the photos by averaging them pixel by pixel, but also because it makes me smile that there is almost nothing average, conventional in these photos.

This is what the market really looked like that day: