I miss my Fuji camera after not touching it for a year

I realized that I used my Fuji camera maybe twice in the last year. There was too much adulting in my life and no time to go out just to make photos. Most of my photos of the past 12 months were made with my iPhone on the way to do Something Important.

I like shooting with my iPhone 12 mini, as I always have it with me, and it takes one button press and a swipe to get the camera ready for shooting. I also like the simplicity: there are pretty much no setting to be bothered with or distracted. The seamless HDR makes it work in any lighting conditions and so on, and so forth.

However, the pictures from iPhone often look too digital. Artifacts or sharpening and compression that are very hard to fix. The little details often look crumbled, or the computational rat brain mess them up. And overall, the files are sometimes not flexible enough for my style of editing.

I think I’m missing shooting with a real camera. The shooting experience with my Fuji XT-4 is very different from an iPhone. Physical deals to control exposure, ISO, exposure compensation, and aperture. The viewfinder (though not optical). I can change most of the settings by turning dials without looking at them. Whereas, on iPhone everything is done via the touchscreen, and the retrograde in me says it’s not the same.

I also have a Ricoh GR III, which is a great little camera, but the shooting experience is somewhat between the iPhone and Fuji. There’s no viewfinder, and there aren’t enough deals to change settings either. Also, the low dynamic range makes it difficult to shoot in some lighting conditions.