Hey Slobodan: Is there any place you don't take your DSLR? (Blush, blush!)
I wish that would be true. In reality, I leave my cameras (DSLR or p&s) at home way too often. I wish I have Zorki5's tenacity to "
never ever leave home w/o a camera."
And yes, I took a camera (though not a DSLR) to
that place you probably have in mind too.
You see, during my years in Russia, I traveled on business to some areas quite different from the westernized expat refuges (i.e., glitzy restaurants, hotels, and shopping malls) in Moscow in the mid-nineties. Hotel accommodations in those other places was more in line with Soviet standards. For instance, Krasnodar, in the south of Russia, had one floor of one hotel (!) renovated to western standards (by Turkish contractors - something that won't be possible as of this year). Clean bathrooms, marble, Italian faucets, etc. The price was reasonable, about $60 per room. At one point, however, there was some sort of convention in town and I was forced to stay in a Soviet era Intourist hotel, the only chain allowed to host foreign tourists in the past. Their prices reflected that old mentality of charging more to foreigners, coupled with the fact that they probably knew everything else was already fully booked, so the price was $100. But their rooms, and especially bathrooms, were a far cry from the Turkish renovated, Italian marble, etc. ones in the other hotel. So I took out my p&s (an Olympus Stylus at the time) to document something more akin to a public toilet in a seedy part of town than a $100-a night hotel. Sorry, can't show it to you now, my then-wife tore up the print, as too inappropriate to keep
The only other time I left my DSLR at home for a significant trip (and have regretted that to this day) was my trip to Belgrade in 2010. I just took a Canon G10. To make matters worse, I made another one of those once-and-never-again decisions, i.e., to shoot only jpeg. I thought that, with no options to download the memory card during the trip, it would be prudent to save some space on it. Big mistake.
Nevertheless, I made two shots that have a special meaning to me. One of my now-late father:
... and the other on a layover stop in Paris. The Paris shot, in spite of being a straight-out-of-camera jpeg from a p&s, printed on a 30"x40" canvas, is now my best selling print at art fairs: