The best camera in the world, as the saying goes, is the one you have with you.
Like most iPhone users, initially I treated its camera function as a toy; for taking pictures of my children on holiday. But quickly I realised my phone could be used to tell stories in a way that is impossible with conventional camera equipment, the tools I've been using professionally for more than 20 years.
During a trip to Bali, my son, Charlie, and I spent a morning using the iPhone to photograph brightly coloured fish in a pond. A few weeks later, I returned to use it to photograph Bali's rice harvest, taking more than 800 images. I was forced to slow down by the long pause as the iPhone app - Hipstamatic, which makes pictures look as though they were taken by an antique film camera - reloaded. It made me think before taking the next image. The technology, in fact, encouraged me to approach the project in a way that was absolutely new to me.
Walking around a city armed with only a mobile phone makes you invisible as a photographer, enabling you to get close to your subjects and allowing for a degree of intimacy that is all but impossible when carrying chunky cameras and bags of heavy gear.
Most people in the developed and developing worlds have a mobile phone, and almost every phone has a camera. That camera is part of the future, I believe, of personal expression.
The camera phone is a powerful tool for looking at and seeing the world. Understand and embrace that idea, and everything changes. Suddenly, you start looking at raindrops on the window of a bus differently - the same bus you've been catching to work every day for years. You begin to see the patterns and geometrical shapes painted on a road to guide traffic as things of beauty. Footprints on sand in afternoon light become art. They almost demand that you capture their image.
