Lately I’ve been working on a project. After experimenting with the iPhone app Hipstamatic, which I blogged about here, I decided to begin a photographic adventure of chronicling impressions of my neighborhood, Boston’s South End.

There’s something appealing about a camera whose sole purpose was to record moments. Not to create high art, but to capture simple elements of life being moved through. Add to this the immediacy of the iPhone, a device so ubiquitous, so integral to the way we absorb, communicate and share moments of our life all day, every day. There would seem to be no better tool to capture fleeting impressions of a neighborhood and in capturing them, exploring what the neighborhood has to communicate to us through its imagery and details.

When you’ve lived in a neighborhood for a long time, the small details tend to disappear into the larger landscape through which you move every day. What happens when you stop to notice them? When you, in fact, seek them out? What, then, will you see?

As a photographer, I’ve always loved playing with windows, water and other transparent and reflective surfaces as devices through which to capture an image. It creates a different way of seeing something and allows me to play with perception. This approach is especially effective for my neighborhood project, where multiple aspects of what was existing in a particular place at a particular moment end up together in the same image. It also happens to be a perfect metaphor for how we as humans perceive things differently, because we each have our own set of “lenses” through which we experience the world around us.

These images are a preview of the collection I am building of things that caught my eye, whether I was walking to work, running errands, or simply walking around the South End. Places I love, interesting objects, unusual juxtapositions. As I mastered the different settings on the Hipstamatic app, I was better able to control the outcome when I snapped a photo, but some of my favorites are the happy accidents.