Pretty much any picture of a tree that I’ve ever posted on BNut was taken with my iPhone’s camera. It’s just a matter of convenience and that my tree photos tend more toward “photo as documentation” than “photo as art”. The phone is always in my pocket and there are no additional steps between taking a photo and uploading it to the web.
I have a Canon DSLR as well as an old 35 mm Minolta SLR film camera, but I don’t tend to use them for snapshots. The DSLR gets used when I’m focused on taking really high quality, artistic photos, especially if I want lots of bokeh. The old 35 mm camera only gets used when I’m looking to take gritty lo-fi artsy shots where film grain is a feature, often on some sort of wacky film stock (Redbird, Lomochrome, etc.) that does funky things to the color palette. Even with the “good” cameras, I’ve never bothered to invest in any high-end glass. The lenses that I have are basic kit lenses. It turns out that’s enough to take your photography surprisingly far. I don’t have a need for a bunch of fast f/1.4, f/1.8, or f/2.8 primes, telephotos, macros, etc. at this point in my life.
If I was going to go on a vacation to Yellowstone or something, sure, I’d want to invest in better glass for wildlife photos and wide angle panoramic views. For bonsai, it’s just not necessary. Anytime I want to take my bonsai photography to the next level, all I need to do is buy a proper backdrop and get over my own laziness enough to drag the DSLR out of its case, set up the tripod, slap on the telephoto lens and set it to around 70 to 100 mm focal length, and I’ll get photos that are orders of magnitude better than the bonsai photos I’m taking now.