On a family holiday with her son to San Francisco Bay in 2019, Lisa Carney was practising taking photographs in extreme lighting conditions. “It’s pretty amazing the tonal range you can get with smartphone cameras,” she says. Here she was using an iPhone 10. “I was experimenting with exposure for highlights,” she explains, “while still being able to bring out lots of detail in shadows.”
Carney shoots only on smartphones, usually editing with the Lightroom app, and says that she finds “no need to use large sensor cameras. I enlarge many of my images to poster size and I’m still able to get the quality I need. I like to say, ‘It’s the wizard, not the wand.’”
As is often the case, her 16-year-old son was her subject matter, sitting opposite her on the ferry they were travelling on, his back turned to the Golden Gate Bridge. “I shoot him all the time,” Carney says, “probably too much. He’s lost interest in seeing his photos, but he’s my favourite subject.”
Reflecting on the shot now, she says, “It’s not a happy image. His contemplative expression, the emptiness and slight squalor of his surroundings. It makes me feel a little nostalgic – a little sad.”
