I love my iPhone 17 Pro Max. It’s in my pocket every day. Fast, sharp, better at a dozen ordinary jobs than any camera I owned before 2010. Family pictures. A color I want to keep. The photograph I would miss if I had to walk back to the car for a bag. When I was shooting Tri-X in my Dad’s Canon FT, this kind of picture would have sounded like science fiction.
I’m not arguing against the phone. I’m arguing for the bag.
The strap over the shoulder. Canvas that has taken on the shape of the days inside it. Braided leather strap, the slight forward lean it puts in my walk. That small extra weight is the point. It tells me we’re going out to look, not just to get somewhere.
The Phone I Actually Love
The phone isn’t a toy. Julianne uses hers the way people actually live — looking, making a picture, sending it on — and those pictures matter. Some of the frames I care about were made that way. A kid on a dock. A room we had just walked into. The light already leaving.
The phone is the notebook. Some days it’s the whole camera. I use it without guilt. What it cannot do is ask anything of me. It’s so good, and so light, that I can make a dozen pictures without ever deciding I was making pictures. That’s a gift. It’s also how you walk through a city and come home with nothing that feels like you were there.
The Usual Outfit
Most days the bag stays home and I carry a Leica Q3 with its built-in Summilux 28mm f/1.7. One camera, one lens, one way of seeing. Twenty-eight millimeters is close enough to how I look at a street that I stop thinking about the lens and start thinking about the person in front of me. It will focus for me when I need it. It’s small enough that a long day doesn’t become a negotiation with my shoulder.
I supplement it with an M10-R. Both from the same town in Germany — Wetzlar — and a completely different animal. In the bag with it: a 50mm Summilux f/1.4 and a 35mm Summilux FLE f/1.4. Two lenses that love to be shot wide open, both asking me to focus manually and precisely.
The Q3 lets me stay in the walk. The M10-R takes me just far enough out of it. You don’t compose on a screen. You look through a small window — a rangefinder — and turn the focus ring until two images in a little patch become one, then you press. Sometimes you’re late. Sometimes you’re exactly on time, and the picture has a weight that a burst of twenty phone frames never quite finds.
Both cameras can make exceptional pictures. What I notice more is what they do to me. A rangefinder doesn’t make better photographs. It makes me stand still long enough to see them.
The phone is always with me. The bag is a decision.
The One That Stays Home
Sometimes I take out the SL2 with a 24–90mm zoom, the Vario-Elmarit-SL. It’s a serious camera, and the zoom covers a lot of ground. On a short outing, or when I know I’ll want to reach farther, it earns its keep.
It’s also bigger and heavier. On a long day — a walk that turns into dinner, a new city with Julianne and the family, a Saturday that starts at the bay and ends whenever it ends — I’d rather carry the smaller ones. The Q3. The M. The bag that doesn’t announce itself.
New Cities, and the Ones I Already Know
The bag comes on the trips. London painted LOOK RIGHT in the street and I did, and then I photographed the instruction. Edinburgh in the rain, umbrellas overlapping like a second sky. A flowered alley I would have walked under without looking up if I’d been looking at a map on a phone.
Famous places are easy. You can make those pictures with anything. What I want from the bag on a trip isn’t a sharper postcard. I want to be a little inconvenient. I want the weight on my shoulder to keep me from drifting into the phone, from treating the city as a corridor between reservations. Julianne is in a lot of the frames. The family is in a lot of the frames. The photographs I keep are usually of us being somewhere, not of the somewhere itself.
New York was a family trip: a hotel room at the end of the day. Sarasota was a walk, crossing the bay on foot. Julianne, Allie, wind off the water. No skyline to collect. Just the long way across.
The harder test is the days that aren’t a trip. I’ve walked Bayfront Park in every kind of light. The banyans, the benches, the boats sitting on the glare. A tiny red door on a stucco wall I’ve passed a hundred times and finally stopped for. The same streets. The same Gulf. The reason to keep carrying the bag is that the ordinary days still have pictures in them, if you’re walking slowly enough to see.
I don’t need the Leica to make a photograph. I need it to make me the kind of person who is looking.
The Bottom Line
The iPhone 17 Pro Max is a remarkable camera, and I use it without apology. What it cannot do is slow me down. A Q3 over the shoulder, or an M10-R with a Summilux I have to focus by hand — that’s a different way of being in a city, or on the same stretch of Sarasota I’ve walked a hundred times. The bag comes with us because I still want both hands on the camera, not just the one holding the phone.