As seen in The New York Times

As a person who grew up delivering, reading, working in and then leaving newspapers, I'm more than guilty of a certain reverance toward the paper of record -- The New York Times. But I only get the print edition on Sundays and I confess that much of what I love about the paper now is what I see of it online. And their Lens blog is among the content i love.

Recently, Lens put out a call to readers to submit their personal cell phone images for a planned gallery. I was never a big fan of cell phone photos and always sort of mocked people who I saw on the street trying to capture meaningful moments with an inferior piece of technology. A lot of that changed after I got an iPhone and started playing with some of the "cameras" available in assorted apps.

So I when I saw the Lens call-out, I looked through my iPhone set on flickr and picked out four images that I liked and sent them off to the New York Times through the wonder of the Internets. Several days later I received an email telling me that my work had been selected to run in a gallery going live online the next morning.

Friday, July 10, I couldn't wait to look at the site and see what was used. Lens received 1,500 submissions for its cell phone project, and the editors cut that crop to 350 images. Two of my photos were selected. There's some very good work in here and some very mediocre work in here. And the comments are kind of interesting because some people have a real problem with iPhones and iPhone apps, especially.

I'm just happy to have had something published by the New York Times. It would be cool to have had it be in print, but those days are gone, I imagine.