About "there is so much more to photography than...": a guy I met in a vacation years ago was taking pictures with a low cost phone with at best an average sensor. Nevertheless his pictures were always more memorable than the ones that other people in the party were taking with 1000+ Euro cameras. OK, he couldn't zoom into the eyes of birds on branches (my cheap 30x compact camera could) but he had enough talent to make me wish he had one of those cameras.