THIS WAS the moment. A warm, dry day in May, 2016. Christopher Armstrong walked his Jack Russell Terrier by the mangroves in Gladesville, in Sydney's inner west, turned towards Looking Glass Bay. The sun was low in the sky. He held his camera over the water and took a photograph. "You touch me deeply," he thought.
The long-exposure photo he saw on his smartphone screen was like a watercolour painting, coloured blue, orange and yellow. "It was near the water, it was a beautiful day and I just took the photo," he says now. "You get one shot. One moment. I saw it being developed right in front of my eyes and thought, 'Oh God, wow'."His amorphous landscape was recently awarded best abstract photo at the iPhone Photography Awards, beating thousands of entries from more than 140 countries. A second Sydney photographer, David Redhill, was runner-up in the abstract category – with his image of afternoon shadows on the Berlin Holocaust Memorial – suggesting that Australians see more to their smartphones than selfies.
Armstrong, 49, from Denistone, in north-west Sydney, doesn't take portraits of himself or anyone else on his generic fruit-based device. "My wife hates me because I never photograph the kids."
Carrying a camera in your pocket is cool but kind of sad, he tell me. "It's quite convenient and liberating. But like any addiction, you have got to be cautious and responsible. You take hundreds of photos you never see and never print. There's always a bit of sadness with that."
We meet on a chill morning near his office in Millers Point, where he works as a technologist, so I might learn how to become an award-winning pocket photographer.
The winter sun streams over the buildings as we walk down to Barangaroo. I am so busy staring at my iPhone that I almost walk into a tree. "I tend to shoot at sunrise and sunset, when there's that mad colour in the sky," Armstrong says.
He first started taking photographs in his late teens on his mum's old Minolta 35mm, while hitchhiking around Australia for a year, capturing images of fire-lit caves or the sunrise at Kakadu. He typically slept rough on hillsides or under bridges. "I would always make sure no one knew where I was, in that 'tread lightly' kind of mentality – so when I leave there is nothing left behind."
He wants to break down the boundaries between photography and painting. "Painting is this mark-making exercise but why is the value of that usually higher than the value of a photograph? It's still a moment in time, in history, which is captured and which you can't reproduce. All of us have this moment that is ours."
The abstract photographs he takes on his iPhone 7 and posts on Instagram are like watercolours, with blurred, almost dreamy shapes. Some elements seem to bear brushstrokes. A collection of his photographic artworks – including snaps from Broken Hill and Broome – will go on show as part of the Above/Below group exhibition.
Armstrong creates his images with the aid of a long exposure app and slow shutter app. He posts many of them on Instagram, along with short poems he writes. His award-winning photograph was accompanied with the words: "Our lives touch just a fraction/ of the people on this planet/ You touch me deeply".
"That photo came out of nowhere and half of them do," he says. "A lot of my imagery is about experimentation and playing with landscape and light. If you are playful and a little uncaring, you can have moments that come to you that you don't expect."
Don't overthink images, he says. "Let yourself make mistakes. I could go back over the last couple of days and there will be 20, 30, 50 photos of nonsense, absolute rubbish, and maybe one image that is nice."
His best photographs often come by chance, while he is walking his dog Mitch, in the early morning or late afternoon. Aspiring smartphone photographers should try to see the world anew, he says. "It's about being awake and opening your eyes again, and realising that it's not just a train station, it's not just the bus, it's not just my house.
"It's about having that keenness to be a bit fresh. You just get one chance to hit it."
In other words, watch the world around you rather than just your smartphone – lest you walk into a tree.
- The Above/Below group exhibition is at 220 Creative Space/Gallery, Woolloomooloo, until July 23.
