Intentional Camera Movement
What Intentional Camera Movement Is
Intentional camera movement, usually shortened to ICM, means moving the camera on purpose while the shutter is still open. A normal photograph freezes a fraction of a second. These do the opposite. The shutter stays open for around a second, the camera moves, and everything that passes in front of the lens in that time lands in the same frame. Shapes give up their edges. What is left is color, light, and motion.
Every one of these is made in camera, in a single exposure. None of the blur is added afterward in Photoshop. If a frame does not work, it does not get fixed later, it gets made again.
Why I Started
Photography school drilled perfect exposure and perfect focus into me. In 2019 I started breaking both rules on purpose: longer exposures, intentional blur, images that feel like time passing by. Then came lockdown, when days passed like hours and weeks passed like minutes, and the blurred frames started to look like how the days felt. I didn't know it when I started, but I was making a project about time.
There's another reason, and it comes from the other side of my work. Somewhere along the way I found myself reaching for a video camera instead of a still camera whenever I actually wanted to tell a story. Video holds something a photograph normally can't: duration. It shows how long a moment lasted, and how it moved. That's where the stories were, so that's where I went.
These photographs are my attempt to bring that back the other way, to put what I learned shooting motion into a still frame. As a director of photography you spend your career deciding how a camera should move and what that movement makes a viewer feel. A slow pan settles a scene. A push pulls you in. Here I'm making the same decisions, just with one second to do it in instead of a whole timeline. The move is the shot.
A photograph normally holds a moment. These hold a whole second of one.
How a Frame Gets Made
The movement is the composition. A vertical pull turns a stand of trees into streaks. A slow horizontal pan trades a shoreline's sky and sand for their colors. Walking with the camera lets a lane dissolve at the pace of a stride. Each of those is a different decision made before the shutter opens, and the direction and speed of the move matter as much as where the camera is pointed.
It is not a technique that rewards precision so much as repetition. The light has to be right, the movement has to be right, and the two have to happen at once. Most attempts get thrown away. The frames below are the ones that held.
The Six Frames
These were made across Boston's North Shore between 2019 and 2025, in Salem, Beverly, Beverly Farms, Peabody, and Gloucester. Together they make up Dreaming of Boston's North Shore.
The Walk Home
Peabody, MA · 2025An afternoon walk under peak fall color, the lane dissolving as the camera moved with my stride. One exposure, one whole moment.
Falling Light
Peabody, MA · 2024Autumn woods pulled vertical in a single second of movement, the trees trading their shapes for pure streaks of green and gold.
Quiet Tide
Beverly, MA · 2019The shoreline at last light, sky and sand traded in a slow horizontal pan until only their colors remained.
Night Passage
Beverly Farms, MA · 2019Bare winter trees at dusk, with headlights writing their own lines through the dark below. A full second of a cold night.
Open Water
Gloucester, MA · 2022The horizon off the North Shore reduced to bands of blue and one soft line of light. The quietest frame in the drop.
Ember
Salem, MAA study in warm light and shadow, the camera moving through a single glow until it burned like an ember.
Common Questions
Is the blur added in editing?
No. Every frame is a single exposure made in camera. The movement happened while the shutter was open.
How long is each exposure?
Around a second. Long enough that a whole moment lands in one frame, short enough to still hold a shape worth looking at.
Can I buy them?
Yes. Each photograph is sold as a signed and numbered limited edition print, alongside a hardcover book of twelve further photographs and a zine. Details are in the print shop.
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Limited Edition Prints
Each of these six photographs is printed on archival lustre paper, inspected, signed, and numbered by hand, in an edition of five at 16 by 24 inches and ten at 4 by 6 inches. Once an edition sells out it is never reprinted.
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