The great thing about camera bags is that no matter how much you
spend,
you will never be at peace with one camera bag. It will always be too
big, too
small, not padded enough to check through, not slim enough to carry
on, ... . You may be sure only of the following:
- you will eventually have a closet full of camera bags
- you will never regret having spent big bucks for quality
Ideal Shopping Procedure
The best way to shop for a camera bag is to gather up all of the gear
that you think you'll be likely to use on a typical project and walk
into a well-stocked camera store. Budget at least an hour to find the
bag that best fits the gear collection.
The holster
A holster-style bag is sized precisely for one camera body attached to
a particular lens. The ThinkTank
web site is a good illustration of the possibilities. Tamrac is
an alternative high quality supplier and publishes a useful fit chart. The
holster is not used in between photographs; the camera needs to be
kept out and ready. The holster is used to protect the camera/lens
between projects and when the camera/lens is tossed into a standard
backpack or duffel bag.
The small bag
A small bag holds a camera body, three lenses, and maybe a flash.
Typically these are rectangular bags with a shoulder strap. Perhaps
the classic example is Domke,
the perennial favorite of photojournalists. I find this kind of bag
good for
leaving under a table at a wedding reception, but not great
for access to gear while I'm in motion.
A minor improvement on the standard design is the addition of a waist
belt that can be tucked back away when not in use. The waist belt,
pioneered with the venerable
Tamrac 709, stabilizes the bag on a long walk.
Some designs worth investigation:
- LowePro, especially the AW
versions that are rain-proof
- ThinkTank Urban
Disguise (shoulder bags) and Change
Up (waist belt, backpack straps, chest harness); the ThinkTank
bags include an integrated rain cover that can be spread over the
bag
Photo.net reviews of small bags:
The big bag
Once a shoulder bag becomes large enough to hold enough equipment to
cover a wedding or an entire medium format system, it becomes awkward
to carry and difficult to dig through. Consider a backpack. The best
big camera bags that the author has used is the LowePro SuperTrekker
AW backpack.
The SuperTrekker is a big frameless backpack divided up with foam. It
has only one level so you don't have to figure out what goes on top of
what, as with big shoulder bags. I've stuffed this one bag with two
Canon EOS bodies, five EOS lenses (including a big telephoto L zoom),
plus a Fuji 617 monster, lots of
accessories, a tripod and film (it was that long ago!). The bag was
not quite full. You can configure the case to hold a 600/4, a 300/2.8,
a folding view camera, or maybe even all three.
Back before I got old/wise enough to hire assistants, I found the
SuperTrekker very comfortable to wear and it had thoughtful and clever
design features that took years to appreciate fully. The SuperTrekker
can be a little tight for putting in an airline overhead bin, though a
couple of times I checked it with no ill results.
The tripod case on the back is worth mentioning. It separates from the
backpack if you wish to carry it separately, is big enough for a
Manfrotto/Bogen 3021 and ballhead, and is well padded with foam.
If you are caught in the rain with the bag, unfurl the built-in
rain fly.
The photo backpack
The SuperTrekker is too big and heavy to carry while taking pictures
and, even if you force an assistant to wear it, getting lenses out
while the backpack is in a vertical position is not easy. LowePro makes some smaller
backpacks that are worth investigating. The Rotation 360 from ThinkTank is
perhaps the most interesting idea in photo backpacks. The lower part
of the pack can be swiveled around to your front temporarily. It
opens at the top so that you can conveniently change lenses while
standing and wearing the rest of the pack on your back.
The voice of experience (LowePro versus ThinkTank)
We asked Peter Menzel (interview) to compare a LowePro
to the ThinkTank backpack that he had been using:
The Lowepro
Vertex 200 AW held the following: two Canon 5D bodies with
vertical grips and lenses attached; the 16-35mm, 24-70mm and 100-400mm
lenses; 2 Canon flashes; Bogen table top tripod; Minolta flash meter;
soft case with extra battery, charger and 10 CF cards; headlamp and
maglite; 15" notebook computer and charger. As an
all-in-one backback--for photographic missions requiring airplane
travel or complex shoots where I need more lenses and gadgets--it
doesn't have the room. For my needs, the Lowepro
Vertex 300 AW would probably
be more appropriate.
The Vertex 200 backpack is rugged and well thought-out. It looks
waterproof, although I wonder how the newfangled waterproof zippers
will hold up over the years. I like the waistband and shoulder straps:
the harness system offers good support for hiking with minimal
equipment. It has good straps for attaching a bigger tripod too.
I normally use a Thinktank
Airport Acceleration backpack, which, in addition to the equipment
listed above, holds a 70-200mm lens, a 100 macro, and an infared
remote receiver and trigger. The laptop slot is less padded than the
Lowepro, and the harness system is not as good. I would take the
Thinktank for transporting gear at airports, taxis and for moving
fragile equipment around. The Lowepro would be better for
backpacking and rougher assignments where I need fewer lenses.
-- Peter Menzel
The bag that stays at home
For about $130 you can get a waterproof, dustproof, indestructible
plastic hard case. It will hold a moderate array of equipment and look
very nice sitting in your basement.
If you're going to be spending a long time in a hostile environment,
e.g., a sailboat, one of these might be worthwhile, but they are very
user-unfriendly. If you can't get to your equipment, you probably
can't take a very good picture. A Pelican or Zero Halliburton case is
nice if you are collecting cameras but not very practical if you want
to use them.
You might imagine that a hard case like this would be ideal for
check-through airline travel. However, the last thing that you want is
a rigid case transmitting all the shock directly to your equipment.
The bag that is at home in the belly of an airliner
Suppose that you need to check or FEDEX lighting equipment and
larger cameras/lenses and then, once you've arrived on location, work
out of the shipping container. You need an "air case". These are made
with a rigid plastic core, strong enough to support this 200
lb. photographer. The core is made of shock-absorbing foam and then it
is wrapped inside and out with more shock-absorbing foam. A final boon
of an air case system is that all of this foam functions much as the
foam around a picnic cooler. This protects gear from temperature
extremes (though remember not to put film in checked luggage; airports
use much higher strength X-rays on checked bags than carry-on). If you
don't want airport baggage handlers opening your case, you can use a
TSA-approved luggage lock on the zippers. Each case comes with a
wrapped-foam divider system that is adjustable with Velcro. You have
to budget a couple of hours to cut up the dividers to suit your
goals.
There are three major brands of air cases: Lightware, Tamrac, and Tenba. I've had good experiences with
six or seven different Tamrac bags, but have never tried their
"protective hard cases." I have a Tenba case and the dividers come
from the factory with sewn-in Velcro. It works perfectly. My
experience with the Lightware case:
- Paid $380 back in the 1990s when this was real money.
- Spent a whole evening to cut up the dividers and attach the
supplied glue-backed Velcro strips to the edges.
- Ran out of Velcro fasteners because Lightware was rather stingy
with the supply.
- Called Lightware to ask for a few more Velcro strips. They
demanded $1/strip to drop a few more in the mail.
- After a couple of trips out of the house, my dividers were all
drifting from
their moorings; the Velcro strips had come unglued from the divider
edges. I
called Lightware and they said "oh yes, that happened to lots of
people; we had a
bad batch of strips." They sent me some new strips with allegedly more
tenacious
glue.
- After every airplane flight, the dividers shift and I have to
reglue
the Velcro, despite the fact that I never put more than 45 pounds of
stuff in one
of Lightware's largest cases.
Second opinion: I once asked a clerk at Calumet what the difference
between Lightware and Tenba was (they had both on display). She said
"the Lightware sucks".
The photo vest
If you're a gearhead, you'll probably end up with a camera bag too big
to carry around an art museum or a city. One effective strategy is to
leave the bag in the car trunk and use a photo vest to carry what you
need for a specific sub-project. Some photo vests have sufficiently
large pockets to hold a 70-200/2.8 zoom lens, but none alas have
pockets large enough for a mid-sized body with mid-sized lens
attached.
The main problem with photo vests is that they make your neck hurt,
but they are still more comfortable than most shoulder-strap
bags. Plus your equipment is much more accessible.
Nikon made an interesting vest they called "Vestrap", which is
sometimes available on the used market. The Vestrap has two little
runt strapettes that you hook to your camera and then clip to the
vest. The weight of the camera you're using then becomes part of the
vest weight as well. The vest looked beautifully tailored, at least by
computer nerd standards, and the pockets were large enough to hold
70-200/2.8 lenses or second bodies. I tried this vest for a month in
Italy and didn't like it. First, the
pockets aren't padded on the outside so if I sat down or took the vest
off, the lenses took a lot of hard knocks. Second, I quickly
discovered that a neoprene strap distributed the weight of a camera
more comfortably than the Vestrap collar. Third, when you have the
camera clipped in, it is difficult to take the camera or the vest off.
You become inextricably linked to the vest and your equipment. I
thought it was a reasonably good vest for covering a photojournalism
assignment where you're going to be on your feet and focused on
photography for a few hours. However, I preferred living out of an
older Tamrac vest.
The belt
If you find yourself melting in the summertime in that photo vest
and/or it
won't hold your big lenses, try a belt system. The pioneer in this
product category
was
Kinesis. I used a Kinesis
system to cover
MIT's
1998
graduation and found that a Canon EOS-5 body with vertical grip
plus 70-200/2.8L
lens all fit into one of the pouches with the enormous 70-200's
plastic
sunshade attached. I ran into Charlie Krupa, an
AP News photographer, at the MIT event. He
noticed my Kinesis belt and pointed to his own: "don't you just love
this
system?"
More fruits of the Kinesis belt system:
Head of the Charles
1998.
The strap
The thin straps that come with camera bodies are good for keeping a
tight leash on your equipment. If you don't mind a bit of stretch,
thick neoprene straps distribute the weight of a camera much more
comfortably around your shoulder. The Tamrac "boomerang" strap is a
good example of the maximum in width and comfort. I was a big fan of
the Tamracs because the same plastic connectors can be used to switch
the camera into a (discontinued) Tamrac "Action Strap" in about 20
seconds. The Action Strap was a clever contraption that has the camera
hang down from your neck against your chest and a neoprene belt with a
hole in the middle comes around your waist to sit over the lens. This
presses the camera up against your chest so that you can ride a horse,
for example, without getting battered by your camera. When the time
comes to snap a picture, you can pull off the neoprene loop in about 2
seconds, raise the camera to your eye and expose. It cost about
$20 but was discontinued during the Bill Clinton Administration.
The view camera case
As noted in "Choosing a
Large Format Camera", when using a monorail view camera on
location, you probably aren't going to be carrying it too far (was it
Edward Weston who said "if it is more than 500 feet from the car, it
isn't photogenic"?). The most convenient way to carry a view camera is
with a huge case that lets the view camera hang from its rails. You
can have the camera out and set up on a tripod in less than one
minute. Jeff Hirsh at Fotocare
is probably the best person to talk to for a recommendation.
