‘I rotated the shot, then layered on top the silhouette of a passenger’: Brendan Ó Sé’s best phone picture

How the Irish photographer mashed up multiple images from the streets of Seoul, Tokyo and Kyoto

In his day job as head of development in the Language Centre of University College Cork, Brendan O Se takes annual trips to Japan for student recruitment. In his free time, he shapeshifts to street photographer, exploring with his iPhone the cities to which he's been temporarily transplanted. Using the Snapseed app, he created this multilayered image out of three trips: to Seoul (in South Korea) in 2017, to Tokyo in 2019 and last year to Kyoto, where the base image, with the yellow marking, was taken in a train station.

I rotated the shot, then layered on top of it the silhouette of a passenger repeated in the bottom right and top left corners, to create a frame," O Se says. I then began pulling in images from elsewhere: I had shot the guy in the mask on a subway train in Tokyo, while the red and blue lights came from a neon display reflecting on a taxi in Seoul.