For those of you who know me, you know that I have been an avid photography nut since junior high school, and I've been a bit of a snob about it too!  If you read last year's blog you might remember that on our Central European trip I carried my Olympus 4/3rd mirrorless camera with me to take "serious" shots--shots I intended to bring home and optimize in Lightroom and Photoshop, the best of which would be printed. I also fully intended to use it for the majority of the pictures for the blog thinking it would make the best images. It didn't take me long to realize that the hassles associated with downloading photos from the camera and then transferring them to my Samsung tablet, which I use for editing the journal and inserting pictures, would be more trouble than it was worth. The workflow would have entailed transferring the shots from the camera to the tablet, working on them in Lightroom Mobile and then creating jpegs that I could use in the journal. Or, I could take a shot with my Samsung Galaxy S21 phone and the jpeg that the phone camera created automatically would be added to my Google Photos album and, for good measure, automatically be backed up into the cloud. Back in the hotel room I simply had to copy the pictures from Google Photos directly into the journal. Although I knew that the workflow of using the phone camera would be much easier than fussing with the Olympus, I was completely surprised at just how good the pictures were that I took with the phone. In most cases these shots were as good or better than what I could have achieved with my Olympus. I kept using the Olympus for shots I thought  were particularly worthy, but if I wanted them in the journal, I also took the same shot with the phone. By the end of the trip I was barely using the Olympus. 

This revelation was both humbling and liberating. I was far more limited when shooting with the Olympus knowing the work I had ahead of me to get the shots into the journal. When I switched to the phone for all of our journal shots, I was far more prolific and, truth be told, I was enjoying the photography much more. 

I have recently purchased a new OM Systems (the new name for the company after Olympus sold its camera division to an investment group) OM-1 camera which is an extraordinary device and I really enjoy using it. When packing for the Scandinavia trip this year, I simply couldn't bear to leave the new camera behind. Jill and I rationalized that there would be several days in the fjords when I could take off on my own and really concentrate on my photography and become more familiar with the OM-1 and its powerful feature set. Unfortunately, the crappy weather prevented me from being able to do so.   Consequently, my cool new camera sat mostly unused, taking up valuable pannier space. Next year I won't even bother to take the OM-1 with me and will instead focus entirely on phone photography. 

Earlier this year I had also upgraded my phone to a Galaxy S22+ with its dedicated telephoto lens and greatly improved processing engine. I've been amazed anew at how good the pictures have been from this new phone camera. It's been a delight to use on this trip. When Samsung comes out with the S24 later this year, I will be acquiring the top of the line Ultra ( or whatever they end up calling their bigger device) with its separate normal, wide angle and telephoto lenses and will look forward to using it exclusively for all of my photography on next year's adventure.