I’ve been selected the winner of a photo contest that lead up to tonight’s opening of Ordinary Days at South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, California. They asked for submissions that exemplified our own ordinary day told in photographs, so I selected some from my iPhone (of all things!) that I’ve taken on what are in fact many-a-ordinary-day.

Winning netted me a pair of tickets, drinks, food and an after party! Should make for a wonderful Friday evening. See my submission after the jump or go here.

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I couldn’t talk about Polaroid photography without posting something about my favorite Polaroid photographer (to date) Grant Hamilton. I pretty much wish I had thought of using a Polaroid camera the way he does long ago because it’s just brilliant. If you could paint with this sort of camera this is how you would do it. There are way too many great ones to post so go see the rest for yourself here and here.

In the spirit of Polaroid happenings this week, I thought I would share a video created by Charles and Ray Eames for the original Polaroid SX-70 instant film camera. Naturally they did an awesome job at visualizing how the camera works, I love all the close up shots they got of the mechanics and the film quality is classic.

While my camera isn’t nearly as cool as the SX-70, I still love carrying it around from time to time and seeing what I can capture with it. Soon I will be posting some of my own Polaroids and hopefully I will be able to obtain more film in the near future…looks like it could happen.

I am taking part in ISM’s Instant Gratification show at the Copro Gallery in Los Angeles which opens this Saturday, January 9th. 2000 Polaroids from over 200 artists will be on display from floor to ceiling and there will be live music throughout the night. After the show is over a jury will select a collection of these photos to go into a book that commemorates the event. Should be a great show! Especially for those who are still in love with the instant film medium.

The show opens at 7p and lasts until 11p.

As promised, here is a collection of some photography I’ve been experimenting with on the iPhone this year. Many of these are either shot with the Toy Camera application or edited with the Camera Bag application, others were taken with just the standard camera. Both of the aforementioned apps go a long way in making photos look interesting, giving them depth and character you’d never get using the stand alone iPhone camera.

It’s strange to see these for the first time on a computer screen, some look better and some look worse than they do on the iPhone. I thought to maybe not include some of these in the post since they look quite grainy, blurry or dull but I still like the compositions so I decided to let them stand. The variety you get when you have a camera with you 24/7 is pretty remarkable, it’s almost like always carrying your sketchbook or voice recorder to capture things as they happen naturally.

Recently I was asked to take shots of the band Free Moral Agents, so I borrowed a friend’s Nikon D70 (I’m only sporting a pocket-size Canon SD780 at the moment) and this is what came of it. We kept the shoot pretty loose and just worked with the back yard set that we had. I’ll be posting these and the rest to my portfolio once I have a chance to update the photography section.

Dan McPharlin’s Flickr page is full of incredible work, and I was most taken by these cardboard miniatures of analog gear. Not only are they great but the way they are set up in the photograph, the quality and tone of the photos themselves are brilliant. Check out more of Dan’s work at his website (which actually just links you to his Flickr page), he has quite a wide range of inspiring material.