I went to Gettysburg a couple of months ago with a friend. I took my Nikon z50, 2 z lenses and three other lenses with the FTZ adapter. It wore me out…not only carrying it all around but trying to decide which lens to use over and over. Meanwhile my friend was happily snapping away on an iPhone and got some great photos. The third day, I left all my gear in the hotel and just used my iPhone (12 pro) and had a blast. I started rethinking everything after that because honestly this hobby that I love was not fun on that trip. It was a burden. I’m a hobbyist, self taught, not brilliant but wanting to take really good memorable photos of, well, whatever catches my eye. Just saying I would take only one lens didn’t work because I would second-guess myself and just spin my proverbial wheels around my lack of knowledge and indecisiveness. So I sold ALL my Nikon gear. Planned to just use my phone. That lasted a few weeks but the other part of my dilemma is that I simply love having a camera. A dedicated camera. Enter, the Olympus OMD 10 Mark IV with the 14-42 EZ kit lens. I LOVE this little camera. I can take it everywhere with me. It is feature-rich (including IBIS). Maybe at some point I will decide to add another lens but, for now, the one lens I have does everything I want. I am having fun working more on composition and learning the camera. Sometimes you just need a hard reset I guess. I’m using my phone camera more too because I’ve finally realized how capable it is. I don’t want to be a person buried under camera gear anymore. I just want to be a good photographer. I have a friend who uses nothing but her iPhone camera and gets spectacular results. She has a really good eye.

I could be wrong, but think Eric was being sarcastic. When I pulled out an iPhone 4 to do my walrus pic 11 years ago on a photo trip, the photo leader gave me a hard time. However more recently I have been on many photo trips where there are people who only use a phone to take pics. To me, it is great! It means on small planes with minimal luggage space and weight limits, I have less problems with my gear. Also the Phone photographers are usually much less "competitive" and take up less space around the animal. And phones really do take great pics and video! On a recent trip to Alaska, I took video of the brown bear cubs complaining to mom to give them the clams she was finding and the sound on the iPhone came out better than the times I have used a Rhode VideoMic Camera-mounted shotgun microphone on my Nikon D500:

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