Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My iPhone

I was taking a train from New York to back to Boston recently, and—as I usually do when I am coming home from a trip—I started flicking through the photos that I had taken on my iPhone.  I’ve never stopped to give it a lot of thought, but this had become common procedure for me.  Suddenly I realized that with all of the SLRs and Point & Shoots and Flips that I tend to carry around, the images on my iPhone actually tell the truest story of what I’ve been doing.  Thumbing through my iPhone cameraroll is an accurate re-telling of what’s been happening in my life on a day-to-day basis.

I’ve always liked the camera in the iPhone, and have been relatively happy with the results that you can get from it, but I hadn’t stopped to think much about the role it was playing.  I enjoy taking photos, and I have a lot of fun doing so.  Still, with an SLR, and even a Point & Shoot, I spend more time thinking about the shot—how it’s framed, are the settings correct, etc.  With the iPhone camera you take the shot.  Maybe it comes out, maybe it doesn’t.  There’s a charm to that.

It also leads to a lot of shots that you may not stop to take with another camera: a sign at the airport, the cup of coffee you just ordered, a funny bumper sticker.  I used to keep boxes of old ticket stubs from concerts and movies, but now I take a photo of the movie poster as I’m walking into the theater, or the marquee outside of a show.  It makes a nice timeline.  I also takes tons of photos of food.  I probably have a photo of every meal I’ve eaten in a decent restaurant in the past year (much to my wife’s delight).

And it’s not just photos, it’s screenshots too.  A funny text or Twitter.  Something cool I see online.  A map of a trip.  It all gets dumped into the photoroll without much thought, but afterwards they become pieces of a puzzle that are easy to put back together.

You don’t have to read a lot about photography to see the oft-repeated phrase “The best camera is the one that’s with you.” While this has always been true, when I stop to think about it with regards to the iPhone, it’s incredible.  In the roughly two years that I’ve had this phone, I don’t think it’s ever been more than 30 seconds away from me. Seriously.  It’s usually in my pocket.  Sometimes it may be upstairs when I’m downstairs, but that’s about it.  I don’t go out of the house without it.  I don’t leave it home when I go somewhere.  It’s literally with me everywhere, and as result, I have photos of things that I may have never captured with a regular camera.

I’ve never kept a journal.  I have a website/blog/Tumblr dealy.  I have a Flickr photostream.  I have this column.  These are all outlets for sharing specific information that I choose.  I put at least a small amount of thought into everything I post on these sites.  I take a certain amount of pride in it all.

And yet I can sit, as I often do, and look at all the photos on my phone and feel like I’m watching the story of my own life.  As mundane as it sometimes is, I never get tired of it.