He starts his day with his beautiful photographic tool, prepared the night before in hopeful anticipation of a day full of visual wonder. Every lens, camera, and sometimes film, combination explored in his mind for the plethora of scenic possibilities that may confront him during the day at hand. He awakes, proudly slinging his camera du jour, venturing to a local café where he may map out his “photo walk”.

Reality sinks in with each sip of his oat milk latte. For months, even years now, he has attempted to capture beautiful, fleeting and increasingly disappearing moments, of a world growing uglier by the day, for a narcissistic audience growing more jaded, self-absorbed and increasingly negative. His images must compete with a digital bombardment of auditory, textual and video excess: algorithmically perfected to a new golden ratio of 1/3 talking-head to 2/3 rage-inducing stimuli. What right does he have to add another speck of white noise to the swarm?

He sighs and takes out his iPhone 17 Pro, carefully composing a tableaux of his static, unused camera with the Leica-red coffee mug, which is sadly one of the reasons why he frequents this cafe. With a click of the iPhone’s screen, 15 raw images are captured instantaneously, stacking them to maximize dynamic range, remove noise, enhance details, followed by the processor’s detection of the subject, auto-masking and then blur effect to simulate “bokeh” and finally a pleasing film-like color science filter is overlaid.