The Best Camera Is the One You Have With You

Sometimes the most interesting photographs aren’t the ones you plan.

They’re the ones you notice. I took this image through the window of a plane as we were flying over the Waimakariri River into Christchurch. I had been inspired by photographer friends who regularly photograph our braided rivers from the air, and I’ve always loved the incredible patterns, colours and shapes they find from above.

Of course, when I finally found myself looking down at it, I didn’t have my camera with me. I had my phone.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m pretty well known for my phone photos. I’m constantly stopping to photograph something because I’ve noticed an interesting patch of light, a strange shape, a reflection, a texture or something completely ordinary that suddenly doesn’t look ordinary at all. And this was one of those moments.

Looking down from the plane, the Waimakariri didn’t really look like a river anymore.

The turquoise channels twisted through the landscape like veins. The grey riverbed became an abstract canvas of shapes and textures. Without any sense of scale, it could almost be something viewed through a microscope rather than a landscape photographed from thousands of feet in the air.

So I took the photo.

The camera doesn’t make you see.

There’s an old saying in photography that the best camera is the one you have with you.

I think there’s a lot of truth in that. Would this photograph have technically been better if I’d had my professional camera with me? Probably. But I didn’t. The choice wasn’t between taking this photograph with my phone or taking it with my camera. The choice was between taking it with my phone or not taking it at all. And I’ll choose taking the photograph every time. Because photography isn’t only about equipment. A camera can record what’s in front of you, but it can’t tell you what to notice.

That’s the photographer’s job.

One of the things photography has taught me is to really look.

We walk past interesting things every day because they’re familiar. We stop seeing them.

But change your perspective, get closer, move further away, look down, look up, watch what the light is doing – and suddenly something completely ordinary can become something else. A river becomes an abstract painting. A shadow becomes a shape. A reflection becomes a landscape. Something you’ve walked past a hundred times becomes a photograph simply because, on that particular day, you actually noticed it.

You don’t need to be travelling somewhere spectacular. You don’t need perfect light. And you definitely don’t need thousands of dollars’ worth of camera equipment in your hand every time you want to make a photograph. You just need to keep looking.

I think sometimes, particularly as professional photographers, we can become so caught up in creating the perfect photograph that we forget about the simple pleasure of taking pictures because something caught our eye. Your phone gives you permission to do that. There’s no pressure. No lighting setup. No elaborate plan. You’re simply responding to something you’ve seen. And I think doing that regularly actually makes us better photographers.

It trains us to recognise composition, colour, shape, light and those little moments of visual interest that other people might walk straight past.

So take photos.

Take them with your professional camera. Take them with an old camera. Take them with your phone through a plane window. Look for patterns. Look for strange light. Look at familiar places differently. And most importantly, look for the unique in the everyday.

Because sometimes the photograph you weren’t planning to take becomes one of your favourites.