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The Gadget Bag Problem (Camera Remix) Summary: First I ramble about the ways I carry gadgets. I establish that for the most part I don't need a bag. Then, in a shocking twist, I reveal that I do need a bag to lug a camera around, and then take you on a guided tour of my past & current solutions to the problem. You may choose to skip directly to the camera portion, as it is the only part which, as they say, actually deals with a gadget bag. To All The Gadgets I've Lugged Before Generally, I try to avoid the gadget bag problem. I mean, sure, I love me some gadgets, but the more things I have to remember to grab on my way out the door, the more likely I am to forget some or all of them. Or, more importantly, choose not to take them. This has meant that my "gadget bag" has either been in (a) summer, a pair of cargo shorts (two identical pairs, really), or (b) winter, a nice jacket that adapts well to a wide range of temperatures and has enough interior pockets to supplement the pockets subtracted from my more pedestrian khaki pants. Cargo shorts are really ideal because the four front pockets are filled naturally (to me, anyway), with:
At one point in the past, the phone pocket was occupied by a venerable Palm Pilot Pro, but I came to the inevitable conclusion that if I had to pick one, it would be the phone. And that the phone would have to be small, and that it would have to basically do the things I ended up using the Palm for: calendar, todo list, and phone book. Happily, the T616 fits this bill adequately enough for me to be to content to wait a little while for that part of the future to catch up. The iPod has also kind of tangentially occupied the Palm space (far more successfully than my abortive attempt at owning a Pocket PC did), but because of the very specific way an iPod is used, it mainly just needs to be transported to and from my car. If iPods could be updated wirelessly, it might never leave my car, which already contains all the other necessary charging and playback apparatus. (The car is kind of specific sort of gadget bag, although -- ironically -- it lacks a certain necessary portability.) I will also briefly say that I do also have a laptop bag, which also serves a very specific purpose: getting my laptop to a friend's house, or to a new city. I have an excellent bag by Eagle Creek which quite handily holds a 15" PowerBook, charger, and -- as needed -- extra battery, books, iPod, headphones, etc. I'll ramble about that in a separate entry. The Problem What finally drove me to need a bag was when I finally bought a digital camera (a now long-lost Kodak DC240 that never successfully made the trip in the mail to my brother Doug). The immediacy of the digital camera -- as I've commented in this space several times before -- was revelatory to me, and caused to me to start looking at the world in terms of pictures everywhere I went. Which led me to want to carry the damn thing with me at all possible moments. At the time I bought the camera, I was living in Pittsburgh. And it was winter. And I had the most glorious heavy multi-pocketed coat in the world, which could easily fit an unbelievable number of gadgets in it. Sadly, as soon as spring hit, the coat become useless for the purpose of gadget-carrying. (I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to determine at what times of year that coat is useful in Austin, TX.) But now I was addicted to carrying that camera, and it clearly wouldn't fit in one of those pockets on my cargo shorts. So now what? Finding a Camera Bag I looked briefly at camera bags, but it turns out that they're all structurally weird and kind of ugly. More on that later. Someone suggested I check out a camping store; surely they had solutions for the storage and lugging of, y'know, "stuff." Camping is kind of the ur-gadget pasttime, as much as its devotees may want to think they are getting away from it all with their space-age metal and plastic tents. This is what I ended up with:
 Green bag with G1 beside it. Like my laptop bag, this bag is made by Eagle Creek. In fact, I chased down the laptop bag precisely because I liked this bag so much. It's shapeless until filled, the main area can easily hold a small point-n-shoot camera, and the auxiliary mesh are perfect for holding Compact Flash memory cards. It can also convert easily to holding phone and iPod, if my current pantswear lacks sufficient pockets. It hangs comfortably, and is -- as far as I'm concerned -- a stylish "look, I could camp at ANY SECOND" green. Most importantly (and this is also true of my laptop bag) it has swivels built into the strap so that it's almost impossible to get it tangled up. But then I bought a new camera. And it's just too big for this bag. And there's just no getting around the need for padding and support once you start sticking longer lenses on your SLR. So I bought this Tamrac bag at the same time I bought the camera, with the intention of getting an approximate solution that I'd refine later:
 First pass at a new bag, shown with the Canon Digital Rebel in it. The internal padding is arranged to provide support when the camera is placed vertically, as pictured. There's also space off to the sides that can be used for iPod or (as you can see sitting jauntily atop) my little mini tripod. There's plenty of extra pockets and mesh for CF cards, extra batteries, and any other small gewgaws. "So, Eric," you ask, "that seems great! Aren't you done?" Sadly no. The first problem is that, just by virtue of pesky physics, the bag has to be a certain size to encompass the camera. It could be smaller if I didn't keep a lens attached to it, but that's counterproductive to the whole spontaneous picture taking angle. So it's not very graceful to lug this thing around, which makes it that much less likely that I actually will carry it around. Which means I'm not carrying my camera with me as frequently. Which means I'm going to miss more shots that I notice out of the corner of my eye. Which defeats the whole purpose of the gadget bag in the first place. The second problem is that it, like ALL camera bags, looks like a big, ugly, fabric crate. Now, I grant you, anyone familiar with my ever so practical t-shirt and shorts wardrobe might be shocked to discover that I have certain aesthetic requirements, but you can rest assured I do. The third problem is that the bag has no real space for additional lenses, especially not a telephoto lens. Nevertheless, I used the bag for about a month, and it turned out to work admirably as a way to keep the camera and accessories organized and contained, and as a great way to carry the camera to my car. Once I'd gotten the bag in the car, I found that I tended to just leave the bag there, and hold the camera as I prowled around. From time to time I'd go to a local store and eyeball other bags to see if I could find one that had maybe more of a satchel look, but mostly I found things that looked exactly like what I had. The Problem Grows At the end of the month, though, I settled another important question, which is what lenses I was going to get to supplement the kit lens that comes with the Digital Rebel. The kit lens is pretty nice zoom lens, whose only serious flaw is a maximum aperture that ranged from f3.5 to f5.6. So I got myself a fixed length 50mm lens with an aperture of f1.4 (since I take most of my shots at the 55mm end of the 18-55mm zoom lens), and a 70-200/f4 telephoto lens. The 50mm lens is nice and compact, and probably would have fit in the bag, but the telephoto has no chance -- by itself, it's longer than the bag. So I took all this stuff, put it in a grocery bag, and carefully lugged it down to the Austin Camera Co-Op, where they quite graciously ignored me for an hour while I glared at various bags (imagine the Milk Guy from Clerks) to see what bags could actually carry these items without causing me to list to one side or the other. I eventually settled on this, another Tamrac bag:
 The bigger bag
 Interior view of the bigger bag So, pros: a nice, "I could be camping, DAMMIT" green color, a comfortable strap, and interior padding that could easily be structured to support the camera horizontally, even with the telephoto added. The two lenses not attached (even if one of them was the telephoto) fit well vertically in the two silos created at the right side. And there's extra space for other gewgaws and gizmos in the other silos and pocketses. Perfect! Not really. Here's the relative size of the various bags:
 All three bags. Notice that while the middle bag is maybe two to three times the size of the originally, perfectly-sized bag, the larger bag is approximately FIVE HUNDRED times larger, and requires one to carefully not swing hips or arms while walking so as not to tip over and be forced to resort to taking arty shots of grass and anthills. But, goddammit, can't argue with physics! Got X number of things! Got to put them somewhere! Thinking Outside the Hideous Fabric Box But I had another idea. In my research, I'd seen someone post a message saying that they used a bag for water bottles to carry lenses. And I'd also read about camera straps that could be detached by being unclipped. So I took another pass through the bag section, with a different set of criteria in mind. I came up with this:
 Lens bag from side. I of course was already immediately charmed by the "at any time I could be SKATING or BIKE MESSAGING, DAMMIT" ambience of the bag. And it actually hung comfortably and, dare I say it, a bit aerodynamically. We'll just take it as read that I'm probably a little more likely to spontaneously camp than skate, and move on, though. More important was the clever way in which even the telephoto lens fit snugly inside:
 Close-up of lens bag, showing lenses. This bag opened up a whole new approach. When combined with the breakaway strap:
 Top view of camera, break-away strap, and lens bag. ...I now had a solution that allowed me to carry the whole shebang (camera and lenses and gewgaws) on straps, but to eliminate the camera strap as needed if I just want to handhold the damn thing. This is perfect: it's modular in useful ways, and scale to meet the solution. It doesn't require that the storage solution become the focus of attention. Because I required some field-testing, I also got the really big bag, but it's become almost immediately obvious that it'll be useless to me and will be going back soon. I rationalized it to myself as being something that I could put the whole system into when traveling, but when packing for my current trip it was shamefully apparent that the big bag takes almost the entire interior of my normal luggage bag. On the other hand, the original black bag still does a very nice job of holding one camera body and one lens, and -- as previously established -- does a yoeman's job of being a kind of home base for the camera in my office or in my car. So the combination of black bag and lens bag together take up less space than the Really Big Bag, and again maintain the flexibility of a modular solution. I can even stuff the strap into one of the side silos of the black bag. This solution still has yet to be field tested; it's only really undergone the "how well does it pack" test (and since I'm writing this on a plane, the complete results of that have yet to be evaluated). But it feels right, and it feels comfortable. (Except that none of these newer bags have those nice never-tangle swivels that the Eagle Creek bags do.) Stay tuned. Conclusion I'll conclude by restating the point I've been circling around: modularity, at least to me, is the key. Just getting a big enough box means the box will stay at home. It's better to have smaller objects that can be mixed and matched to fit the situation. And the trick, ultimately, is figuring out how you're going to use these things so that you can figure out the obvious and common ways you'll want to decompose your stuff into different bags. For me, the decomposition turns out to be: the core stuff that goes into my pockets, a set of stuff that goes with my laptop, and a set of stuff that goes with my camera. And for both the camera and laptop scenarios, there's an even further subdivision of stuff that can be put in or pulled out depending on what I'm planning on doing, and a core set that gives me enough flexibility to adapt. |