I am not a photographer. But about eighteen months ago I started carrying a small camera everywhere , nothing expensive, a used Sony point-and-shoot, and it changed something about how I move through the day that I'm still trying to explain properly.
The phone camera is better. I know this. The computational photography alone makes my little Sony look primitive in certain situations. But the phone is also the thing I use for everything else: email, messages, work, the endless scroll. When I pick up my phone to take a photo, I'm one notification away from not taking the photo. The camera has one job and that focus is most of the value.
The other thing is the pause. To take a photo with a phone you hold up a rectangle and tap. To take a photo with a real camera, even a small one, you have to look at something first. You have to decide it's worth stopping for. That pause has made me notice things I would have walked past. Light on a wall in the afternoon. My son's face doing something specific that won't happen again.
The camera is an excuse to stop. That's most of what it does. The photos are almost secondary.
I'm not precious about it. Most of what I shoot is bad. The framing is off, the light is wrong, I miss the moment by half a second. But occasionally I get something that captures what something felt like, not what it looked like, and those photos are worth every missed shot.
I still use my phone for photos at family things where what matters is that someone got the shot, not how it looks. But for the rest of it, walking around, travelling, being somewhere and wanting to remember it, the small camera stays in my jacket pocket, which is where it belongs.