This week I watched a video on a social site about an older photographer who found that as the years go by, he carries fewer and fewer heavy, full-sized cameras. The result was that he made more and more photographs with his smartphone, which he said wasn’t very satisfying.

His solution was to turn to a much smaller mirrorless camera, which, because of its smaller sensor size, uses smaller, lighter lenses.

I think this is a great idea for a lot of photographers. I agree completely that smartphone photography isn’t ever going to be great, no matter what the “next big thing” is, because the whole genre has descended into a hobby that mostly resembles watching television. Everybody does it, and everybody does it the same way. It’s unsatisfying because it takes away “being a photographer” and replaces it with watching something on a screen.

Sure, smartphones are a good tool in the tool box, but I never really feel like a photographer when I am making pictures with it.

These ideas made sense to me, especially when it comes to travel photography. What is the real purpose of travel photography? The video maker made an interesting point: by now, anywhere people can go has been photographed, most of that has been shared on the web, and as a result, AI knows what everything looks like.

I know that sounds a little grim, but it’s probably true.

So where does that leave our travel photography? Sure, photography is fun, but often less fun when we turn it into a competition or a chore. And sure, the adventure itself is fun. But really, the only thing left that makes our photography valuable is when it becomes part of storytelling.

For example: we all know what the Golden Gate Bridge looks like, in the day time, when it’s foggy, at night. The story, then, becomes telling the audience through words and pictures not what it looks like but what it WAS like.

That’s the challenge of this article: to use photography to tell us what it was like.