Happy Sunday! Tina from Travels and Trifles posed an interesting topic for Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, which is phone photography.

I started taking more photos with my phone when I got my current phone in 2023. Before then, I’ve always thought the photo quality from my DSLR was superior compared to the phone, regardless that I could take pictures with a phone and have the photo be in RAW. But then, I went on a road trip by myself in 2023 and it was during the trip when my then-new phone (Galaxy s23) convinced me on phone photography.

I was in Flagstaff, Arizona on Christmas of 2023, walking the empty streets of downtown. I didn’t bring my camera because I thought I was just going for dinner and I knew with high ISO and slow shutter speeds, I probably wouldn’t be able to get decent shots. I thought if I want to take photos, there’s always my phone.

I didn’t think they were bad. I thought these shots were different – a much-wider angle – and when I returned to the motel and threw the RAW files into Lightroom, cropped them, and they turned out okay. Although I still mostly stuck to my DSLR for the duration of the trip, I found my phone to be quite useful in circumstances when I just wanted a quick shot and don’t have the big camera handy.

In 2025, I went to Wyoming for a quick weekend trip. While I was there, it was misting and raining non-stop, which rendered my DSLR useless because not only the lens would be dotted by the endless mist, but have you ever tried to photograph with a DSLR while holding the skinny rod of the umbrella between your cheek and neck like you would a telephone?

For the rest of the trip, the camera remained stowed away in my backpack and the phone became my camera. Something I learned from the trip was I can always crop my photos. Even though I lose the zoom capability when I’m in the “Pro” mode of my phone’s camera, with a resolution of 50 megapixels, I can crop out the bits of the photos I don’t want and the photo will probably still be in high resolution.

Since that road trip in 2023, my phone has produced quite a few favorites whether is flowers in the garden or a natural rock formation by the interstate or even that memorable plane ride over Grand Canyon, which made me re-think my belief that the DSLR or mirrorless is the superior camera. Maybe the phone is catching up?