Like the three other Times reporters who cover Canada, I work throughout the country. So in my (untidy) office in Ottawa I keep a work backpack ready for leaving town. My one tip for anyone who travels frequently on short notice is to buy a second laptop charging brick and keep it in your travel pack. Yes, I came to that solution the hard way.

Along with my laptop, a Leica M (Typ 262) camera and three or four lenses go into my backpack when I head out to the airport or the car. Photos supplement my notes and voice recordings. They also make their way into the weekly Canada Letter that I write (please subscribe), and they sometimes illustrate my articles.

A lot of people use a smartphone for photography. Why bother carrying a dedicated camera?

The adage that the best camera in the world is the one you have with you is completely true. Most smartphones can produce very nice images, and I certainly use my phone’s camera. But squeezing a camera into a phone brings many compromises.

Their incredibly small image sensors don’t match up to those in dedicated cameras, especially when the light is low. The tiny sensors also mean that you can’t really take advantage of the different perspectives that different focal lengths of lenses offer on dedicated cameras. Composing on a screen held away from your face is far from ideal, and if you learn about photography, controlling the exposure and focus of the camera become a big part of it.