Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Aidenn asks, When you take photos during your travels, what type of camera do you use? For example, point-and-shoot, SLR, DSLR, or just a smartphone.

My current camera, which I haven’t used in a while since I started the podcast, is a Sony A7rii. It is a full-frame mirrorless camera.

Before that, I used a Nikon D200 and a Nikon D300s.

Smartphones weren’t really a viable option when I started traveling. I literally began my travels a few months before the iPhone hit the market in 2007.

The camera quality on smartphones has gotten pretty good now. For much of what you might want to use a camera for while traveling, a smartphone is probably good enough. There are some things you can do to optimize your image quality on the phone, such as saving your images in RAW format instead of using a compressed format such as jpeg. Most newer smartphones have an option that will let you save images in RAW even if they are hidden. Some third-party camera apps make this easier.

There are some things that you can’t do with a smartphone. Action and wildlife photography isn’t very good. Low-light images are poor on smartphones. Long exposures are difficult.

The limits of smartphones for photography are due to their very small sensor size and the fact that the lenses are fixed. If the light is good and you aren’t trying to do anything fancy, it’s probably good enough.