I spent a week over New Year's in Chiang Mai, Thailand, a city of 160,000 residents about 700km north of the nation's capital, Bangkok.  Chiang Mai is a laid back city full of colourful temples, quaint cafés, fantastic restaurants, used bookshops and roadside markets.  It was my third visit to Chiang Mai in the past seven or eight years, and I enjoyed it tremendously.

Having visited Chiang Mai before, I didn't feel compelled to lug my heavy 35mm DSLR camera and lenses everywhere I went, opting just to carry my iPhone in my pocket instead. One of the highlights of the visit was meeting a family from The Hague, Netherlands who were staying at our hotel.  Their two sons, Maarten and Sebastian, accompanied us to the Thapae Boxing Stadium for an evening of Thailand's very own Singha beer and Muay Thai.

I spent a good part of the evening wandering the stadium and shooting the action with the Hipstamatic app for my iPhone; this is a collection of some of my favourite photography from the night. Perhaps I should call this my "ChiangMaiPhoneography" series.

See more of my iPhoneography elsewhere on my blog or on Flickr.

"I have a camera.  Sometimes, I use it to make phone calls." - Marty Yawnick, Life in LoFi: iPhoneography

There's something about shooting with my iPhone that has really captivated me of late.  Maybe it's the constantly growing collection of exciting and powerful photography apps available for download on iTunes.  Or perhaps it's the ever-increasing popularity of #iPhoneography that I see everyday on Twitter that keeps inspiring me to be more creative.  Either way, for someone who spends most of his time peering out from behind the lens of clunky DSLR or medium format cameras, the freedom and flexibility of making photographs my iPhone is a welcome change of pace for me.

From lights gleaming off the hood of an Audi prototype electric car to the rooftop of Marina Bay Sands casino, from a clients' statue of Mao Zedong to a portrait of a friends' sleeping infant, from a snapshot of Vampire Weekend performing live on stage to the view of the wall across the road from my favourite little coffee shop, this is how Singapore has looked through the 3 megapixel lens of my iPhone the past few weeks.

See more of my iPhoneography elsewhere on my blog or on Flickr.

Motivated by the very generous compliment my friend Faz gave me last week over at her blog "The Drama Diaries", I decided to download my iPhone's photos folder to my Mac and see what was hiding in there...

Here's what I found: a small collection of iPhoneographs I made on my recent travels to Bali, Shanghai, Melbourne, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and -- right here in my own backyard -- Singapore.

Some of these images have been processed directly on my iPhone using photography apps like MoreLomo and Format126, while others have been post-processed in Adobe's Lightroom 3, which even features a built-in lens distortion correction tool for the iPhone.  I put (very minor) finishing touches on all these images in Photoshop.

I am thoroughly enjoying having a camera in my pocket all the time, and I am continually inspired to better use it by what I learn from blogs like iPhoneography and Life in LoFi, as well as the creative work I see other photographers making.

See more of my iPhoneography on Flickr.

Last week a friend and I took a short holiday to Australia. We spent a few days in Sydney, a few days in Melbourne and one (amazing) day driving along the Great Ocean Road.  It was a fantastic break, and a trip that I won't soon forget.

I have been fortunate enough to visit Australia many times over the years, and each time I go I seem to enjoy it more and more; this time was no exception.  Melbourne was fantastic and the Great Ocean Road was breathtakingly beautiful.  But there's just something I find so special about Sydney every time I visit.  It has a remarkable beauty and an energy that I find both palpable and infectious.

I spent a couple of hours on the afternoon I arrived wandering around Circular Quay, gazing at Sydney's iconic Harbour Bridge and Opera House, and being a typical tourist.  I only had my iPhone in my pocket, but it was all I needed to capture what I saw and felt as the sun set on this amazing city.

See more of my iPhoneography on Flickr.

Photography is one of the most accessible and democratic forms of artistic expression there is.  The ubiquity of cameras -- on mobile phones or small digital point-and-shoot cameras in our pockets, all the way to large, powerful digital SLR cameras -- makes it ever easier to capture fantastic images.

But making great photographs has little to do with owning the best and most expensive equipment.  The real secret behind original photography is in how you see a moment and interpret it in a still frame.  Are you able to make something ordinary appear extraordinary by showing it differently?  Are you able to make the viewer feel a physical emotion when they look at your photograph?  Are you able to transport someone with you to a moment in time simply by pressing your shutter?

Jointly inspired by this artistic and photographic philosophy, as well as by my good friend Mike Sargent (the Photo Editor at the Straits Times newspaper in Singapore), who is never without his digital point-and-shoot camera, and Chase Jarvis (a Seattle-based photographer) and his "The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You" project, I've taken to shooting a lot more often with my iPhone.

It's free.  It's fun.  It's easy.

And it makes walking to get lunch more than just about food; its now a daily photography assignment.

See more of my iPhoneography on Flickr.

Or better yet, share some of yours with me.

**EDIT** An article about the point-and-shoot cameras used by a handful of well-known professional photographers, including Pulitzer Prize-winner David Hume Kennerly, can be found here.