The Camera I Stopped Carrying
This is not an argument that phone cameras are good enough. It is an argument that I was not enjoying the trips.
What the kit was doing to the days
A full kit changes how you move. You plan around light rather than around interest, you carry weight that makes long walking days shorter, and you spend a meaningful part of every good moment deciding which lens it needs.
The photographs were better. That is not in dispute and I am not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of the argument. They were sharper, they held up printed large, and there are frames from that period I could not take now.
But I was working. Every notable thing that happened arrived first as a photographic problem and second as an experience, and after four years I could not tell whether I had been to some of these places or merely covered them.
What replaced it
One small camera with a fixed lens, which removes the decision entirely, and the phone for anything that needs to be quick or wide. That is the whole kit. It fits in a jacket pocket and it weighs almost nothing.
The constraint turns out to be the useful part. A fixed focal length means the only way to change the frame is to move, which means I am walking around a subject rather than standing still and rotating a ring. I look at things for longer now.
The notebook is doing more of the work too. Video for the channel is shot deliberately, in blocks, on days set aside for it, which keeps the filming from bleeding into every other day of the trip.
Who should ignore this
If photography is the reason you travel, this entire post is irrelevant to you and you should carry whatever the pictures require. That is a completely legitimate way to do it and it was mine for four years.
This is only advice for people who noticed, as I did, that they had started organising a trip around the camera without ever deciding to. If you have not noticed that, there is nothing here to fix.
