Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Camera Bags, Forcefields, and Grumpy Salesmen


When I upgraded from the Canon Digital Rebel to the Canon 20D I bought a Hardigg Storm Case to protect it. At the time I was flying from Florida to Albuquerque on a weekly basis and wanted to make sure my investment was heavily protected. The Storm Case had a lot of appeal due to its hard outer shell, fully customizable interior, and waterproof seals. I still love it to this day. However, it is a bulky case that adds a lot of weight to your camera gear. It is not the best thing to carry around a theme park, in the woods, or to conferences.

Speaking of conferences, I leave tomorrow morning to attend Photoshop World 2008 in Orlando. Since I will want my camera and laptop on hand at all times during the show I finally decided (after at least two years of pondering the idea) to buy a soft sided camera bag that would fit most of my camera gear and my 15.4" MacBook Pro. As you can tell from the title and the above photo, I decided to get the Nikon Digital SLR & Laptop Backpack. I also looked at the Lowepro CompuTrekker AW and some random Tamrac bags but decided to go with the Nikon bag based on a variety of reasons. One of which will be the look of horror given to me by Nikon fan-boys when I pull my Canon 20D out of a Nikon bag! It's going to be a lot of fun. I asked the salesman if there was a forcefield on the bag that he needed to deactivate so I could put my Canon camera in it. He didn't even smirk at my great showing of geek humor! Oh well.

While my humor may not be appreciated by grumpy old salesmen, this bag can be appreciated by most photographers. The things that sold me on it while in the store were its weight, size, and pocket layout. As you can see from the photo on the left, it has two main pockets on the face of the bag (upper and lower), one side pocket on each side of the bag, and the laptop bag which is at the 'back' of the bag accessible from the top. Every compartment has a net pocket in it and the side pockets each have a total of three pockets. The upper pocket on the face is laid out for a SLR body with a small lens attached. The lower pocket on the face has padded dividers that can be moved around to create multiple 'slots' of different sizes. Finally, the bag weighs just over 3 pounds and is quite comfortable to wear.

Once I got it home and started adding my camera gear to it that I realized that this bag is very hacker friendly. All of the dividers are padded and have velcro on the ends so you can move them around however you like. In fact, if you remove ALL the dividers then the entire bag (except for the laptop compartment) is just one big compartment; even the side pockets are part of the main bag space. Two padded dividers span the sides to create the individual side pockets. They fit in so well that I didn't realize this in the store. Another divider is used to divide the upper face pocket from the lower face pocket. This made a huge difference for me because my Canon 20D with my primary lens (28-135mm IS) attached would not fit into the upper pocket with its original size. While the vertical divider in the lower face proved to be a bit of a pain when trying to move the 'floor' of the upper face down to make room for it, I was able to get it all to fit after a little finesse. Another really cool part of this bag is a padded 'divider' with a circular hole in it that goes in the upper pocket. The lens pushes through the circular opening so that the weight of the body rests on this semi-divider instead of all the weight residing on the face of the lens! Other bags may have this but I didn't see any of the Lowepro's or Tamrac's with this in the store. Finally, I was able to customize the lens pocket to hold me other two telephoto lens as well as both of my Canon Speedlight 580 flashes. With the Master/Slave ability of these flashes I can now easily carry one for on-camera and one for off-camera use wherever I go.

The exterior of the bag itself is water-resistant and has straps along the face and sides that can be used to clip other gear to or strap a tripod onto it. I wouldn't try to strap a heavy duty tripod to it but my light weight tripod fits just fine. Even with all my gear in the bag, it doesn't stick out like a normal laptop backpack so its ergonomics are much better. If I still had my sport bike I would test its aerodynamics but my guess is that its cross section is much better than my old backpack and that should be good for a few mph gain! Oh, I also need to mention that the bottom of the bag has a hard shell covered with nylon to protect the gear in the lower compartment and the laptop. It is plyable so I wouldn't drop or kick the bag but it will do fine for any bumps or small accidents.


There isn't much to say about the laptop compartment. It is well padded and easily fits my 15.4" MacBook Pro with about 1.5 inches to spare. I seriously doubt you could fit a 17" laptop into this bag. There is plenty of space for the 'height' of a laptop but I don't think a Dell XPS laptop would fit since it is a fat pig. Besides, who would want to carry that kind of weight on them while shooting anyway? Its padding its thicker than the padding on my Targus backpack so I expect there to be less heat transfer to my back after sticking a hot laptop into it and putting it on.

Overall I think this is a great product. However, all I have done with it so far is load it up and carry it around the house. I am a bit hesitant to post this review until after I have carried it around Photoshop World for 3 full days but I feel the bag has a lot of merits based on its hacker friendly design and feature set to warrant an early posting. If I run into any 'field issues' with it during the conference I will be sure to update this post and provide the details.

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