It’s very rare that I use my phone’s camera for any creative photography. I’ll take pictures of my family, selfies, and photos of “stuff”, such as a book I might want to read at some point, or maybe some random oddity I spot while out and about, but it’s unusual for me to take a picture with the same intent I would when using a dedicated camera.

Today’s picture is one of those rare exceptions where I used my phone to take a picture with creative intent. I visited the seaside town of Withernsea this weekend gone – a place I have not visited before – and shot a bunch of photographs on film, and these will hopefully be shared in due course.

As Withernsea has a lighthouse (now a museum), this was an obvious attraction, and I made a number of pictures of it from various vantage points. One place where my film cameras were not up to the job, however, was inside the lighthouse tower itself. Maybe if I’d had a tripod and a cable release, I could have worked something out, but I didn’t. So my only option was my phone, and on this occasion it served me very well, with this resulting image of the inside of the tower looking up at the underside of the flag-draped spiral staircase being the result.

I did climb the staircase – quite a hairy experience given my mild, but still quite quite present, fear of heights – and was interested (and a little scared!) to discover that the metal railings you can see in the picture were not always present – there just used to be a rope!

Samsung Galaxy S25+.

Taken on 25 July 2026