Meet Cocu Liu, a mobile photographer and product designer based in the San Francisco Bay area. He was born and raised in Beijing and lived in Hong Kong and Chicago for several years where he took an amazing collection of iPhone images which appear in the book, Trope Chicago.

I’m a product designer at Uber, focused on designing data-driven maps and crafting data visualization tools for the self-driving car team. A San Francisco resident via Beijing and Chicago. I'm also a smartphone photographer, fascinated by urban landscapes and believe “the best camera is the one that’s with you.”

I’ve been shooting since I was a teenager with a Canon 35mm film camera that my parents bought me. As for taking photos with a smartphone, I started with an iPhone 5 at the end of 2012. I was so impressed with how compact it was – I could easily carry it with me at all times. It was a really great camera so I didn’t even bother carrying my bulky DSLR anymore. 

I currently use an iPhone 7 Plus now. iPhone makes creating a photo much easier than ever before. Taking, selecting, editing and lastly sharing photos all happen on my iPhone. I don’t have to go to my laptop or other devices to do any extra work since the image quality is so great on a smartphone now. I'm really impressed with the quality of the low-light photos on my iPhone 7 and I especially love the low-light feature on aperture f/1.8 with the wide angle lens.

I love shooting on the streets by myself. I usually just walk around the city and look for what draws my attention. The fun part of street photography is that you never know what you’ll get before you discover and explore the actual places. As for my shooting approach, I pay a lot of attention to the light. I really love dramatic light — a few hours after sunrise or before sunset, when you can create silhouettes of the people in the scene.

I’m fascinated by urban design in Chicago. I love to see the great scale differences among skyscrapers and people.

I love shooting winter in Chicago. It’s so unique. The photo below of the Bean (aka Cloud Gate) was taken this past winter, when the blizzard hit Chicago. I remember it was early in the morning and there were only a few people around the Bean — usually, it’s quite busy there. I saw that the snow had turned everything white and then a lone visitor approached the Bean.

The photo above was taken in Chicago on an extremely cold day in the winter of 2015, also known as ‘Chiberia.’ I was looking down to the frozen river with ice floes from the bridge above. What I liked about the scene was the geometric shapes and compositional contrast from the high perspective.

​I edit all of my photos on my iPhone. Filterstorm is one of my favorite post-processing application. I normally use it for adjusting contrast in selected areas of the image with the mask and curve tool. I use VSCO mostly for adjusting color and creating an analog look in my photos. The Union app is a great tool for composing double exposure photographs, allowing me to combine two or more images into one. SKRWT is a neat lens-correction tool. I use it a lot when retouching architecture images. I occasionally use Mextures for adding textures into my photos.

I started to share my photos on Instagram at the end of 2012. I really love the Instagram community and I get inspired by extremely talented artists and photographers every day. I love that Instagram is open to everyone around the world and that my photographs can be seen by an individual in a small town in South America, while receiving comments by another person from a country in the Middle East, with his/her unique cultural perspective – all in real-time.

I really admire the photography work of Saul Leiter, Ernst Haas and Harry Callahan. In the Instagram community, I'm always inspired by @visualmemories_, @joshkjack and @wrongrob. I want to continue shooting streets in the city where I live. For me, photography is a meditation outside of work and daily routine.