Minimizing camera baggage

- Hi, my name is Ben Long and I'm a bag-aholic, I have a real problem with camera bags, I got lots of camera bags. If you watch my gear and workflow course, you can just see me wallowing in camera bags. I've always believed that there is no perfect camera bag so you need to buy all of them and I have to say through no actual conscious decision or force of will, over the last few months, I've turned a new leaf. I have been on the road for about three months and that's included some workshops and another Lynda shoot and so a complex kind of photographic situation, and I've done it without carrying a camera bag of any kind.

I think I've cured my camera bag addiction. We'll see when I get back home and step into my closet full of bags, but I want to show you what I've come up with because I think this is a solution that I'm going to continue to use even if I fall off the wagon and buy a couple more bags at some point. In gear and workflow, I talked about the kind of puzzle of if you're traveling, you very often take more gear than you will need on any one particular shoot but you want to have it with you anyway so you've got the problem of, you've got to get your gear to the site, but then when you're at the site, you want to be able to have a camera bag to carry around and shoot with.

So I've found I think a solution that's really working for me. I have been keeping my camera and lenses in special neoprene sleeves so here's my camera. This is the Fuji X-T1, it's a mirrorless camera, but you can get the same sort of thing for any SLR, it's just a wrap-around neoprene camera-shaped bag, and what's good about it is it protects my camera no matter what I put it in. So I've been carrying it in my motorcycle panniers or in the top bag, and I know that I can throw this in there in any bag that I want and it will be okay.

So that's how I'm carrying my camera, just as a way of getting it to the location that I'm going to and then for my lenses, I've just got these lens sleeves. I got these at a camera store. They're just a generic brand, a lot of different people making these, nice, padded neoprene, drawstring on the top and so I can stick a lens in here and know that no matter where I throw the lens, it's got a reasonable amount of padding. So this is a really nice, flexible way. I can stick, spread lenses around. I can carry them however I want, and then when I get to where I'm going, I've got this thing, I love this.

This is from REI, this is actually a little collapsible day pack that compresses in on itself into this nice little bag. It expands, this is like the James Bond backpack, I love this, it pulls out and now I have this very lightweight, you might call it a little flimsy but I've actually found it to be very sturdy, this nice little day pack, so it's a backpack which personally I think is great because I can no longer use a single shoulder camera bag. I've just messed up my shoulder too much by having a weight on one shoulder.

I really recommend being careful and trying to always use a backpack rather than a single sided bag because it's just going to mess you up eventually unless you're just a lot sturdier than I am. What I like about this bag is it's got these side pockets here, so I can put a bunch of stuff inside but I can stick one lens over here, one lens over here, keep one lens on the camera, and now I've got quick access to three lenses, I can just sling it off of one shoulder to get one side, sling it off the other to get the other, and then when I'm all done, I put everything back in its sleeves, pack it wherever I want and this just compresses back into itself and goes into this really, really small space.

So this works as a means for traveling around by motorcycle bag, I can stuff all this into a suitcase, I can move around however I want. So I'm finding this to be a really, really flexible system for carrying a pretty reasonable amount of gear and without having to have one set of bags to get to the place and another set of bags to go shooting. So I don't know if I'll stay with this. Like I said, I don't know what it's going to be like when I actually get back home to my real camera bags but I've been using this for several months and I'm really pleased with it. So again, this is from REI, these neoprene bags, this is Optech, you can go to optechusa.com, or just check your local camera store.

You'll probably find generic versions of these. It's worth taking a look at these and see if maybe it resonates with you as a way of carrying your gear.