better left unsaid

I need to come clean here. I have a bit of a cam­era bag fetish. I don’t know when it started, though it was prob­a­bly about five years ago and it has gained strength as my pho­tog­ra­phy gear has changed and expanded. For the longest time I was your typ­i­cal, aver­age 35mm SLR shooter and I never really gave much thought to the bag the cam­era was in. I couldn’t afford more than one lens which stayed attached to the body. I hate flash so never needed to carry one. Basi­cally I needed room to carry a sin­gle 35mm SLR body plus a small lens, a cou­ple of rolls of film and maybe a fil­ter or two. You can find a mil­lion dif­fer­ent mod­els and brands of cam­era bag to do that. As soon as I moved into medium-format though, I needed to put a lot more thought into how I car­ried my gear.

I’m of the opin­ion that the bag — any kind of bag — is the utmost expres­sion of prac­ti­cal­ity. Like any tool, the cor­rect bag for the cor­rect job makes life eas­ier. When it comes to cam­era bags it often means the dif­fer­ence between hav­ing your cam­era with you all the time, and hav­ing it rarely to never. When you enjoy tak­ing pho­tos not hav­ing a cam­era with you sort of defeats the pur­pose, right? The dif­fi­culty comes when try to match the bag to the sit­u­a­tion. Unless you make your own or mod­ify a bag your­self, it can be dif­fi­cult to find a cam­era bag that does every­thing you need it to, which is some­thing I’ve been strug­gling with lately.

Unlike most peo­ple, I walk every­where. Not out of eco­nomic neces­sity thank­fully, but because I gen­uinely love to walk in my com­mu­nity. I can’t think of an eas­ier or more healthy way of get­ting to know your neigh­bour­hood. On top of that, I’m lucky enough to live all of 800 metres from my office. So when you walk as much as I do, the bag that car­ries your life within its walls must be pretty spe­cial. For the past year I’ve had two seper­ate bags to take care of it all. When I’m not on-call at work and don’t need to bring my lap­top home with me it’s been the 7-million Dol­lar Home from Crum­pler. When I’m on-call it’s my wicked MEC Brenta courier bag that is almost volu­mi­nous enough to live in. Prob­lem is, dur­ing those weeks I’m on-call and car­ry­ing my mes­sen­ger bag I’m not car­ry­ing my cam­era. I’ve decided that’s not accept­able any­more and thought there had to be bag that would do it all for me. I was right.

I went look­ing online for a good qual­ity bag that would hold my medium for­mat gear, a large lap­top, some per­sonal effects like a small ther­mos, a book and other small items, would be good in the weather we get here in Hal­i­fax — it gets a lit­tle windy and rainy — and be at least some­what cost-effective. There are a lot of cam­era bags for sale these days. Every­thing from the small­est sleeves and pouches all the way up to mas­sive tent-sized bags I’m fairly cer­tain you could go around the world with. After a cou­ple of hours of brows­ing, com­par­ing specs and prices, read­ing reviews — are there any mean­ing­ful reviews online? — I came across a bag that looked like it would work: the National Geo­graphic Earth Explorer 2477, a large shoul­der bag.

After it arrived I went to work pack­ing it up with my usual sup­ply of stuff. Cam­era with lens, extra lens, meter, fil­ter case and all the lit­tle things that seem to go along with tak­ing pic­tures. Lots of space left. Added book, ther­mos, cap, sun­glasses case, still lots of space left, includ­ing the sleeve where the lap­top fits. All loaded up it closes eas­ily and securely with a nice zip­pered flap inside the top flap to keep dust and weather out. On the out­side there are three more large pock­ets, two on the front and one large, document-sized on the back side. Even when fully loaded it’s a com­fort­able bag to carry with a large strap that’s eas­ily adjustable and well-made han­dle on top. The exte­rior fab­ric is a nice rough but not too rough cotton-hemp blend that so far stands up to the small amount of abuse I’ve sub­jected it to.

Over­all, I’m very pleased with my new bag. More of a do-it-all com­muter bag than a pure cam­era bag, but that’s exactly what I was look­ing for. So, I’m up to seven cam­era bags now, hope­fully this one will be the last for a while! If I feel up to it I may take a quick snap of it all, just to show off a little.

Tags: gear · Photography
Posted in: Writings

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