In packing for our month in Europe, I reluctantly left my Canon Digital Rebel T3i behind. See our video where we talked about what we packed to take with us.

I love my Canon, it takes great photos, but, so does my iPhone 7+ and the iPhone is a lot smaller! Besides, I’ve always believed that what makes the most difference in the quality of a photo is a few seconds spent with good editing tools after the photo is taken. I believed that back with Picasa, and I believe it now with Google Photos and Snapseed. I have no ambition to be a professional photographer, that’s a completely different story. I just want to capture my memories and make them nice to look at.

We had 4 cameras with us even without the Canon! My phone, an iPhone 7+, Jim’s phone, a Pixel XL, Jim’s Samsung Camera 2, and Jim’s GoPro video camera. I enjoyed having only one camera, no decisions to make about which one to use, just learn all I could about using the iPhone. The only time I even thought about my Canon was when we were on a train or a boat. It is so much faster to grab the Canon, put it to your eye, twist the lens to zoom in and snap. That can all be accomplished in one smooth motion, 3 seconds top. With the phone, there is always a lot of fumbling to get to the right screen, squinting to see the image on the screen before snapping, and changing your grip to be able to snap the picture. I’m sure I missed a few good shots because I was too slow, but I still got plenty of nice photos. Here are a few, with notes. Many of these would not be possible with the SLR – e.g. in-camera Panoramas, selfies, animated gifs. See lots more (445 to be exact!) in our Album.