The best camera is the one you have with you

We all know that old saying. And it's true of course. I just had a good reminder of it about a week ago. My spouse and I were on a port call in St. Thomas, headed over on a small boat to St. John to go snorkeling. Given that we'd be at the beach and in the water, and had no place to keep any valuables, I'd left my Sony a6000 on board the ship and taken only my little underwater Nikon AW100 with me; it's essentially a point and shoot, and has no viewfinder.

Well, as we were on the boat over to St. John, a brown booby decided to follow along. The AW100 is not the camera you'd choose to photograph birds in flight, but it was the only camera I had with me. I was happy to get the image below.

Feel free to use this thread for photographs you've taken with cameras that you just happened to have with you at the time (maybe your cell phone), that weren't necessarily what you've had had with you if you'd only have known...

What timing for a great topic!

We're heading to Kauai next month and plan on kayaking and other water sports. Really don't want to risk the a6000 on these adventures, so I dusted off an old Lumix 8MP I had in a drawer and played with it some.

No, I won't be able to blow up the shots into posters, but will have a fine memory maker with me that I won't cry over if it happens to get damaged along the way.

I agree, the best camera will be the one I have with me.

Great shot of the bird, by the way!

Beautiful shot! Thanks for posting it.

Thanks for sharing your photo.

Keith

Hi, very good picture!!:)

Outstanding photo. I totally agree with you about camera in hand is worth two in the bush. I never step out of my cabin with at least my small "dinner" canon camera with me. It might not be my Nikon but it does take photo's.

Bob

That is a really nice photo no matter what camera you had! Good job and thanks for sharing!

Nice photo, for most of the world the camera that is with you all the time is a iPhone/Smarphone.

The Nikon 1 line is still amazing for what is still almost class leading PDAF, sadly they haven't leveraged that for anything but their 1" sensor line.

I still enjoy my V1, still waiting for a reasonably priced V4 to appear with the newest Sony sensor ... and waiting and waiting.

Indeed though I love photography and try to bring or have good cameras and lenses around me, the sentiment is true - better to have a camera than to not, so even when you may not have your good gear, it's nice to have any camera with you when some spontaneous scene hits your eye or presents an opportunity. Your booby shot is a good example of getting a shot you may not have gotten if you had to run down to a room to retrieve a camera - by the time you got back, the bird may have been gone and opportunity missed. I used to stick an old P&S camera in my car for just that type of reason - out driving around, commuting to work, going on an errand, etc - I might have seen something that made me wish I'd had a camera with me...having the P&S was better than having no camera at all. Nowadays a good phone camera can take the place of the P&S and serve the same function, even for enthusiast photographers - I'll never intentionally CHOOSE to go out on a photography excursion with a P&S or my phone, because I enjoy photography too much - my DSLR or mirrorless will go with me. But I will use the P&S or phone if a spontaneous opportunity were to arise when my primary cameras weren't available.

I think Turtles06 was trying to start a photo thread about pics from whatever was handy to capture light at a special moment in time.

From a little cybershot P&S. Everything was just right that afternoon and I was fortunate to capture it. I've been chasing moments like that since this photo.