"If you can do this with an iPhone, imagine what you could do with a real camera." Eran Yerushalmi, the Tel Aviv photographer better known as CHIEF, has heard that line more times than he can count. Eran never took the advice. Since 2009, every photograph he has made has been shot and edited on an iPhone, adding up to roughly 30,000 images across 17 years and 16 generations of the phone.

His photos of Tel Aviv's shoreline and rain-soaked streets have since been exhibited and printed in large formats, and they have been featured on Israel's Channel 13, in the newspapers Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv, and on the Tel Aviv–Yafo Municipality's channels.

The collection below follows his journey phone by phone, from a 2–3 megapixel iPhone in 2010 to the 48-megapixel iPhone 16 Pro Max. Each photo is shown in its original frame, alongside the model it was taken on and the size of the original file. Scroll down to see how much changed, and what didn't.

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#1 The Dream Before Everything (Mia, My Older Daughter)

Shot and edited on iPhone 3.

It all began at home. In 2010, Eran photographed his older daughter, Mia, asleep on the sofa, along with her reflection in a mirror. The files were tiny, just a few hundred pixels across, but the way of seeing was already there. "The phone recorded a few megapixels; what it caught was attention," he shared in an interview with Bored Panda.

From the living room, the photographer moved to the beaches and streets of Tel Aviv. He works close to the ground, at the water's edge and sometimes in the water itself, waiting for the moment a puddle flips a street upside down or the low sun turns a passerby into a silhouette. After rain, buildings, palm trees, and people appear twice, once standing and once reflected, and those mirror images have become his signature.

#2 Emma Walks On The Sky (Emma, My Younger Daughter)

Shot and edited on iPhone X.

#3 The Sea Lost Its Temper

Shot and edited on iPhone 6s Plus.

Over time, the family joined the frame as well: younger daughter Emma, leaping along the shoreline or walking upside down through a puddle's reflected sky, and Dylan, the family dog, who now has an Instagram account of his own.

"Most iPhone photography stories show what one new phone can do," Eran said. "This archive shows something rarer: what sixteen generations of iPhone made possible in the hands of the same artist, in the same city." The camera kept changing. The eye behind it never did.