Photography has been a passion since childhood for me. If I dig back far enough, I can find old film photos of me at age 8 with a Kodak 110 Instamatic around my neck. Once I began to travel in earnest, particularly to Europe during college, I progressively built up a trigger happy finger, and eventually "graduated" to the glories of SLR photography, with it's pursuit of lenses, battery grips, filters and external flash.
But after 15 years completely dedicated to the DSLR world — lugging around bags of gear on vacation, to family functions, etc. — I finally decided to experiment with mobile photography. With the iPhone 12 Pro Max, I felt like the technology had gotten good enough that most images I wanted to make were attainable.
It has been a freeing, empowering and motivating experience, and I rarely feel the need to reach for a DSLR.