This is a collection of images taken from within the digital worlds of video games, utilizing specialized "photo modes" and developer tools to capture images in digital space. These virtual worlds allow me to compose, frame, and time photos with the same instinct that I bring to a physical lens, though there are other freedoms in this medium that the physical world cannot replicate. Within these spaces, I am afforded a 360-degree range of motion as well as the ability to bring time to a total standstill or progress the action frame by frame.
With these virtual cameras, I can hover like a drone, pivot through walls or other geometry, and rise to impossible heights in an instant to capture my intended frame. Elements like aperture, shutter speed, focal length, and light sensitivity are all replicated by these tools, allowing me to experiment with the same settings I use in real life on virtual subjects. This environment acts as a completely free space where I can iterate on a shot for as long as I want, utilizing these digital mirrors of actual cameras to develop my skill and hone my eye. In doing so, I can capture a subject exactly as I intend, or even discover entirely new ways of seeing.
While I have a deep love for the freedom these tools afford me, I find the progression of this technology throughout my lifetime to be just as fascinating. These systems have changed considerably since the earliest games I played, evolving from simple in-game items used for objectives into sophisticated creative suites that allow the player to become a digital photographer. As the worlds within video games became more advanced, so did the tools provided to capture them, mirroring my own development behind the lens
Early titles like Pokémon Snap (1999) and Metal Gear Solid (1998) established the camera as a tool for gameplay and had an aspect of artistic expression built into the objectives afforded to the player inside of the gameplay loop. By 2004, this technology took a massive jump. Gran Turismo 4 began allowing players to move the camera all about the car in action, adjust rudimentary settings like focus and aperture, and even export files to a USB stick.
In that same year, Driv3r (a kind of insane name, I know) released and featured the first photo mode I really used in depth. I found the game a little bit lacking in content and it was a bit too repetitive for my tastes, yet included in this lackluster title was a video and image capturing tool that provided a whole separate (and far more engaging) experience than the base game. I would spend hours behind this digital lens rewinding my stunts over and over again, capturing the vehicular carnage within minute-long clips and 640x480 resolution photos. Though unlike the images below, none of the photos or clips I captured would ever leave the hard drive of my original Xbox.
As I continued to get older and my own cinematic horizons expanded, I noticed that film and video games became even more entwined through the rise of one of my favorite titles, The Movies (2005) by Lionhead Studios. In this game, you took on the role of a studio head, spanning from the silent film era all the way up to modern-day special effects and CGI. You managed actors, designed the studio lot, and built sets, but most of all, you created films.
Honestly, the creative freedom was immense in this title. The player could move around the cameras, apply filters, and even overdub your own voice onto characters with a shitty Realtek microphone that you had squirreled away in a drawer somewhere, just waiting for such a moment. I positioned actors on the stage, choosing their props, costumes, and designing the special effects makeup… to a young me it seemed like the possibilities for expression and storytelling were truly endless. It was one of my favorite games as a kid because I felt I had stumbled onto the future of digital experiences, where my passion for film and photography melded perfectly with interactivity.
You could even upload your creations to the developer's website, where regular contests and a sort of community "Academy Awards" occurred to select the best films. This was a revolutionary era of player-led creativity that has since largely disappeared. Today, modern photo modes seem to be some of the last remaining vestiges of that wave of creativity that washed over video games in the early 2010s.
Following the foundations laid by these early pioneers, developers in the mid-2000s introduced even more sophisticated features, like the "Theater Mode" in Halo 3 (2007). This allowed players to fly a free camera throughout a recorded match to find the perfect angle for short video clips and images, further bridging the gap between playing a game and directing a film.
In fact, this theater mode in Halo 3 was so powerful that an entire media group known as Rooster Teeth can trace their origins back to this tool and the comedy they captured within the game. Their legendary Red vs. Blue internet series, where two opposing teams went through various comedic scenarios, touched on both early internet culture and a burgeoning millennial digital humor that still resonates today.
As I continued to get older and my own cinematic horizons expanded, I noticed that film and video games became even more entwined through the rise of one of my favorite titles, The Movies (2005) by Lionhead Studios. In this game, you took on the role of a studio head, spanning from the silent film era all the way up to modern-day special effects and CGI. You managed actors, designed the studio lot, and built sets, but most of all, you created films.
Honestly, the creative freedom was immense in this title. As the player, you could move around the cameras, apply filters, and even overdub your own voice onto the characters with a shitty Realtek microphone that you had squirreled away in a drawer somewhere years ago, just waiting for such a moment to justify its existence.
After I wrote a rough screenplay by hand next to the computer, I went into the game, set up the film, and ordered the scenes. I positioned actors on the stage, choosing their props and costumes, and even designed the special effects makeup… to a young me, it seemed like the possibilities for expression and storytelling were truly endless. It was one of my favorite games as a kid because I felt I had stumbled onto the cutting edge/the future of digital experiences, where my passion for film and photography melded perfectly with interactivity.
Players could even upload their own creations to the developer's website, where regular contests and a sort of community "Academy Awards" occurred to select the best films. This was a revolutionary era of player-led creativity that has since largely disappeared, going the same place as Myspace, Zynga, and other websites that allowed a user to express their digital identity… that is to say, to ruin and bankruptcy.
In many ways, this community was the genesis of modern content creation, thriving as a dedicated hub for sharing video a full year before YouTube even existed. While these Machinima films still exist on some corners of the internet, they are becoming harder and harder to find as the original site faded away, though some of the big-name films remain hosted on other platforms. Upon my own review in writing this diatribe/history of the medium, I now realize that modern photo modes seem to be some of the last remaining vestiges of that wave of creativity that washed over video games in the early 2010s.
Getting back on the timeline of photo mode development, the mid-2010s gave way to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, which saw the standardized rise of the modern "Pause and Fly" mechanic in titles like Infamous Second Son (2014). Additionally, these games finally gave users total control over color filters and focal depth mid-action.
Photo mode technology developed more incrementally during this generation of consoles, mirroring the stagnation of video game rendering technology, funny enough. Where once fans saw their favorite characters change from 2D sprites moving past 32-bit backgrounds and were then stunned by a 64bit 3D revolution at the turn of the century, no such rapid advancements would be seen for many years… that is… until the arrival of Ray Tracing in 2018.
This was the "line in the sand" year for the video game medium, and this tech is what created the before and after on each side of that line. While Hollywood had used ray tracing for decades to render films, it required massive server farms to calculate a single frame. The revolution finally arrived in 2018 when NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 20-series at Gamescom. These were the first consumer graphics cards to include dedicated RT cores, physical hardware specifically designed to handle the complex math of light in real time.
Crucially, Microsoft followed this with the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, which provided the standardized software language needed for game engines to communicate with this new hardware. This combined push finally brought that level of cinematic math into the living room, allowing these effects to happen in real time on a consumer PC.
This marvelous technology allowed the engines that power video games to render light in a more believable manner, simulating the bouncing of digital light particles around world space. Among the advancements offered by this tech, developers could now easily produce scenes where colors reflect off surfaces and bounce onto neighboring geometry. You might now see the vibrant red of an apple bleeding into the matte finish of a white wall when caught in stark sunlight, a subtle but believable detail. Ray tracing also allows for water that can look almost indistinguishable from real life, as reflections upon the surface of liquids can now approximate distant geometry and sky lights far more accurately.
But perhaps most of all, the tech brings out soft shadows that hardly betray the transitions or banding between steps of light intensity. This interplay between light and darkness is so built into human perception that even having the most basic approximation in our digital worlds can truly bring a digital scene to life in front of us.
While this was still a nascent technology in 2018, it was seen as the future of digital scene rendering, and developers across the world were chasing the perfection and better implementation of this tech. Month by month, it moved steadily toward digital maturity as video game developers iterated on models based upon white papers and hardware pushed by NVIDIA. At that time, the company was still primarily known as a specialist in the high-end gaming market, years before its total dominance in the AI sector transformed it into the global titan it is today.
The first game I saw that really took advantage of this tech was released just a year later in 2019: Control. This title happened to have one of the best photo modes yet released, and even here in 2026, it remains in my top three.
Ray tracing looks best on static objects, on hard surfaces, and especially indoors, which as luck would have it… is exactly where the entirety of Control takes place.
Whitin the confines of the Oldest House (Control’s entire setting, based on the Brutalist masterpiece that is 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan) light and darkens bleed together both thematically and technologically.
Around every corner are Brutalist shapes, strange pops of color, endless voids, and horrific cosmic entities which never cease hunting you… a setting which allowed me to capture one of my favorite series in the gallery below. Beyond merely serving as a testament to the cutting-edge rendering tech of the day, this title also sets the industry standard for what a photo mode should be. That is: having full control over the pitch and roll of the camera, filters, aperture, focal length, contrast, and white balance settings. It offered no "leash" on the player character, allowing the camera to fly to the very borders of the map and providing the freedom to use an in-game capture rather than an overlay, which prevents the image quality degradation found in less integrated systems.
