Why My iPhone is My Favorite Travel Camera

Over the past few weeks here in Lagos, Portugal, I’ve been taking and sharing what probably qualifies as an unreasonable number of photographs. Between our blog, Facebook, and Instagram, I’ve hardly shown any restraint. In my defense, Lagos doesn’t make restraint particularly easy. The coastline is astonishing, the cliffs change character with the light, and nearly every morning walk seems to offer something I hadn’t noticed the day before.

Quite a few people have asked me what camera I use, and the answer sometimes surprises them. When Carla and I travel, I rarely carry a traditional camera at all. On this particular journey, every photograph I’ve shared was taken with my iPhone 13 Pro Max. I own a very nice Fujifilm mirrorless camera and some excellent lenses, but they stayed home. For travel, I’ve come to think of my iPhone less as a phone with a camera attached and more as a camera that happens to make phone calls, send emails, give directions, translate menus, and occasionally remind me where we’re staying.

Before going any further, I should probably offer a small disclaimer. I’ve never really thought of myself as a professional photographer. I’m an enthusiast who has spent most of my life moving among different forms of creativity - art, design, writing, photography, and video. I think I have a reasonably good eye, but there are plenty of people who understand the technical side of photography far better than I do. So what follows isn’t photography instruction. It’s simply what I’ve learned about the kind of photography that works best for the way we travel.

The first reason I love using an iPhone is wonderfully uncomplicated: it’s always with me. Good photographs have an annoying tendency to appear without checking whether you remembered to bring your camera. The light suddenly changes. Someone walks through a doorway. A reflection appears on the water. A cat assumes an unusually photogenic position and gives you approximately three seconds to respond. With the phone in my pocket, I can be ready almost immediately without carrying another bag, another lens, another battery, and another collection of things to keep track of.

The image quality has also become remarkably good. A dedicated camera still offers advantages, particularly under demanding conditions or when larger files and specialized lenses matter, but for the photographs I make while traveling, the iPhone gives me more than enough. Most importantly, its simplicity keeps the equipment from becoming the experience. I’m walking through Lagos thinking about the cliffs, the light, and what I’m seeing rather than which lens I should have brought.

There’s another reason I prefer the phone, and this one matters even more to me. A large camera hanging around my neck can immediately announce that I’m there as a visitor looking for photographs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course, but Carla and I tend to travel slowly, and I don’t want photography to put a barrier between me and the place I’m trying to understand.

When we first arrive somewhere, I often don’t photograph much at all for the first few days. I’d rather walk the streets, learn where people gather, visit the market, say hello to the person at the café, and get some sense of the rhythm of daily life before I start trying to capture it. The iPhone helps because it’s discreet and familiar. Almost everyone carries one, so using it doesn’t change the atmosphere in quite the same way a large camera sometimes can.

I’ve come to believe that good travel photography begins long before we press the shutter. It begins with paying attention. Who lives here? How does the morning feel different from the evening? Where does the light fall? What do people seem to value? What details keep catching my eye? The longer I stay somewhere, the more those answers begin finding their way into the photographs.

Connect first, photograph later. That has become one of my guiding principles.

I also love the remarkably unromantic but extremely useful fact that my photographs are automatically backed up. I can spend the morning walking along the cliffs outside Lagos, return to our apartment, and discover that the images are already waiting for me on my computer. No memory cards to transfer, no elaborate routine, and considerably less anxiety about losing a day’s work. For someone who enjoys the creative part much more than the administrative part, this is a beautiful arrangement.

But after years of taking photographs, I think the equipment matters far less than we sometimes imagine.

Photography companies would probably prefer that I not say that. A better camera can give us more capability, but it can’t tell us where to stand. It can’t recognize a beautiful moment. It can’t make us curious about another person’s life or teach us to notice the late-afternoon light touching an old wall. It can’t create patience, empathy, or wonder. Those things have to come from the person holding it.

And that, for me, is really the heart of travel photography. It isn’t simply about bringing home attractive pictures of the places we’ve been. It’s about learning to see those places more completely while we’re there. Photography encourages me to slow down, look again, move a few feet to one side, wait for the light, notice a small detail, and occasionally discover beauty in something I might otherwise have walked past.

The camera - whether it costs several thousand dollars or lives in your pocket - is really just the final part of that process. The photograph begins with connection.

And connection is where the beauty usually is.

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“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

- Henry David Thoreau