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Night & city lights

At night the phone is starving for light, so the whole game is finding some and standing her in it. Do that — a storefront, a neon sign, a streetlamp — and the city's lights behind her turn into glowing bokeh.

A woman at night lit by a warm storefront and neon, city lights blurred into glowing bokeh behind her, no flash.

The annotated breakdown is inside.

The usual miss

It's dark, so the instinct is to fire the flash — which blasts her with cold, flat, deer-in-headlights light and kills every bit of the city's atmosphere. Or there's no flash and the phone cranks the sensitivity until she's a grainy smudge. Either way the mood the night was offering gets thrown away. The fix isn't more flash. It's finding light that's already there.