Also came across this article in the Feature, by Howard Rheingold, on how camera phones are fast becoming a personal storytelling medium.  Howard ponders :

"It looks like this newly ubiquitous device could be more about flows of moments than stocks of images, more about sharing presence than transporting messages, and ultimately, more about personal narrative than factual communication."

He then goes further into quoting from a paper delivered at a conference in Korea at the end of 2004, by Daisuke Okabe :

"Cameraphones enable an expanded field for chronicling and displaying self and viewpoint to others in a new kind of everyday visual storytelling......"

".......For example, the people they observed used streams of text messages to "inscribe a space of shared awareness of one another" -- an explanation for the preponderance of messages that conveyed no information other than what the sender was doing at the moment: "I'm sitting on the bus," or "I'm bored" or "I'm walking up the hill." The cameraphone study extends this framework by revealing how people's choices of images to share enables intimate social networks to share ambient information; but, "on the other hand, we are finding that users tend not to e-mail messages to one another, and prefer to share images by showing pictures on a handset screen." Hence, the communication device that used to transmit messages across distances is now also used to capture a flow of experience in order to add a visual element to face-to-face story-telling......"

I remember the time we would equip our subjects in studies, with disposable cameras to record moments in their lives.  We don't need them anymore with some of the youth target audiences. Especially in India, and many other Asian countries, where its hot for youth to own cam phones.  

Advantages are many ...

• quicker
• cheaper
• much more real life and real time as you're using a tool that fits into their "culture of use"
• easy to transmit via email or post on blogs or Flick'r- like applications
• no researcher bias - the subject is the researcher    

The only bitch is the quality of photographs - I hope cam phone manufacturers get their act together providing cheaper but better quality imaging. 

I'm currently involved in a multi-country study which involves visual ethnographies in people's homes.  As a result, I've been experimenting with capturing lifespaces through the lens. Its an interesting journey ... I never thought my projects would help me learn so much about photography one day !

I was looking around on the web for stuff on photography, and I came across Evelyn Rodrigues post that points to a really neat article from the editor at Lenswork - "Twenty one ways to improve your artwork" (its a pdf file). 

This one resonates.  For ethnographers (ok - we're not there to create 'art' - still.... ), it might be a very useful tip :

"Remember art is not about artwork. Art is about life. To become a better artist, first and foremost become a better person - not in the moral sense, but rather in the complete sense. Remember that the greatest artist is not the one with the best technique, but the one with the most human heart."

Thanks Evelyn, for the link.