After buying your camera and lenses you are going to need to buy something to carry and protect your gear. So I thought I would offer my thoughts on the various bags I have owned through the years. I know a lot of photographers prefer backpacks these days but I do find them difficult to work out of so they are not for me and this is just my personal opinion.

The “bulletproof camera bag”

I got my first proper camera from my parents and they also gave me a bag of a brand of which I do not recall. The thing is I do remember was that it was made from a material called ballistic nylon and I liked to think it was literally bulletproof.

It was a decent bag but there was a design flaw because, as it zipped around the top, if you picked it up when it was unzipped your kit could fall out. Of it did with a resulting expensive repair for my Vivitar super zoom lens. It was a decent bag if you just had one camera body and a couple of lenses which I had at the time but you had to be careful and make sure it was safely secure.

The Jessops range

Having said that I upgraded to a bag from the Jessops range which were bizarrely named after various areas of the Shipping Forecast. The one I bought was the Lundy and it was enough to accommodate my two Pentax cameras as well as my other kit at the time.

Bizarrely I ended up working at the Newcastle branch of that camera shop chain couple of years later. It was a decent bag as I recall but I soon outgrew it as my collection expanded.

Billingham bags

When I was starting out in press photography I realised that most of the snappers on the local papers were kitted out with Billingham bags. So I followed suit and bought a 225 which I later upgraded to a 335 when I was in Sheffield studying photojournalism.

I also bought a second hand Hadley bag which I still found useful in later years during my trip to Russia as it could hold my various travel guides.

But I did find the general bags awkward to work out of because there was a zip on the inside cover before you got to access to your kit. But maybe the cool kids, who were on the documentary photography course in Newport in Wales, had it better because they were introduced to Domke kit (but more of that later).

Having said that the prices of Billingham bags have really shot up in recent years as they were reasonably affordable back then. These days you are talking about £542 for the flagship 555 model which seems a tad too much these days in my opinion. And all the other equivalent models have increased in price in recent years while Domke prices have stayed pretty reasonable.

Domke bags

It was back in the 1990s that I first met a photographer from the National Geographic magazine who was shooting a feature on the Lake District to go with an article which was being written by Bill Bryson. It was interesting to see her shooting style and I noticed that she had an F2 Domke camera bag.

If I am being honest I had probably seen those particular bags in popular culture as they probably featured in every American film featuring photojournalists in recent years.

My first choice was the bag she used which was the Domke F2 in 1994. Basically it was an instinctive bag to work with as there was no restriction to access to your kit and once you lift the top flap.

Crumpler bags

When I bought my first digital camera a mate pointed me in the direction of Crumpler bags. As I recall they were an Australian brand which was considered quite cool and funky.

The camera bags looked like messenger bags and did not scream “I am a camera bag with loads of valuable kit” which was quite good. But it was too small for my ever expanding collection in later years.

National Geographic bags

When I was on a Baltic cruise in 2012 when I got the chance to buy a National Geographic bag as they sold them aboard the ship.

While it looked quite cool it was not that practical and a bit awkward to work out of. Having said that It could accommodate my Nikon DSLR as well as the lenses and my Fujifilm compact camera. But looking back I probably would not buy it again.

The Domke F-803 bag

But I finally found my favourite bag which was the Domke F-803 which also did not shout out that I was carrying expensive kit.

Basically I have reduced my kit to a couple of camera bodies with either a 28mm and 50mm lenses, or 35mm or 75mm lenses, depending on the assignment. Basically I have decided to carry a lot less gear these days and can basically work with the chosen two lenses which seems to work for me.

Basically it is an instinctive bag to work out of and one of my friends, who was on the Newport course, still uses this very bag to this day. And I have added a pouch by Viper, which is handy to carry my SD cards, and I also have a couple of climbing carabiners which secure the pouch and anything else I want to secure to my bag.