Your best camera is the camera you can use when you need one

I like taking photos and I have spent quite some money on equipment. To me taking photos is capturing the moment and share that with others, or some other times you see something/someone that you really want to retain on a canvas.

I was having a hard time packing for my Munich trip even though it was a rather short one. Mainly because I wanted to squeeze in all my photo-taking gears so I wouldn't miss the chance of taking that snapshot. Here is what I eventually brought:

Left: awesome DSLR - Middle: Smartphone - Right: compact DC 

Here is a little statistics:

Awesome DSLR: 8M pixels, 2 photos taken

Smartphone: 5M pixels, 67 photos taken

Compact DC: 5M pixels, 14 photos taken

The DSLR takes the highest quality of photos, supports RAW format (so I can do more post-processing without losing too much image quality), and switches on instantly. But turns out I only used it twice. Why? Simply because it's too troublesome to take it out and put it back into my bag.

In comparison, my smartphone has very few settings and has the lowest quality. But it's in arm's distance.

I did look pretty stupid and amateurish when I used my smartphone to take photos of art pieces and even food. Some people even gave me that look that I'm one of those crazy tourists that takes snapshots of everything (which I didn't). But it's "stealthy" and I can easily show my friends what I took by putting it on the table or handing it out. I can even transfer some of the photos without a single cable or card reader.

I will still take photos using my DSLR and sometimes my compact DC. But I realized most of the time a smartphone is more than enough. Who takes a DSLR when one just hangs out with some friends or does routine work? Plus the quality of the photos taken by smartphones are reasonably good if depth-of-view and amazing saturation are not required (most of the photos in this blog are from my smartphone!).

I believe my next camera will be a smartphone, really.