No More Camera Bags? – Moving Pictures

In the span of my career, a lot has changed.

I dug up a few long-expired rolls of film from the storage room at our office. Three 24-exposure rolls of film is 72 frames. The SD card sitting next to them will hold about 3000 RAW files, or around 11,400 JPEG files.

On the day I started work here at your Ada News, then known as The Ada Evening News, I owned three 35mm SLR cameras, the Nikon FM, the Nikon FM2, and the Nikon FE2. I bought them in college, one at a time, along with a 28mm, a 50mm, a 55mm macro lens, a 105mm, and a 200mm.

And, of course, I needed a camera bag to put it all in, so I bought a blue Lowe Pro bag that held a lot of gear, and held up well under the rigors of news photography. I have a couple of photos made in my apartment that shows that camera bag in the background, and those photos date to about 1997, so it lasted about 18 years.

The funnest story I know about camera bags dates back about 15 years to a Christmas morning. We all thought all the packages had been opened, and none of us felt like anything was missing, but we saw one under the tree at the back. It said it was for Abby, but none of us had any idea what it was or who had given it to her. She opened it only to realize she had bought it for herself six weeks earlier and thought it would look nice wrapped up under the Christmas tree.

As the years flashed forward, photography advanced as well, and I found myself using Domke camera bags. These canvas bags were designed by an actual news photographer named Jim Domke. Photographers at newspapers all over the world used these. They held a lot of gear, and were designed to fit the curve of your hip, since their material wasn’t rigid.

By the turn of the millennium, I used several Domke bags. They were rugged and affordable, and lots of photographers had them.

Interestingly, most of my photographer friends and I found early on that the camera bag almost always belonged on our right shoulder. I don’t know if this was part of the design of the bag, or the intricacy of kinesiology.

The gear we kept in those bags, which we lugged everywhere, was almost always five or six lenses, at least one spare camera, filters, flashes, and most significantly, film. Lots of film.

One of the reasons we no longer need to carry camera bags around with us is that digital cameras have huge on-board storage as well as access to virtually unlimited data storage in the “cloud.” Thus, instead of whole camera bag compartments full of film, we could instead rely on the CF cards, SD cards, memory sticks, and more to hold whole days worth of work.

Another reason for not really needing a bag is zoom lenses. Instead of a 20mm, a 35mm, an 85mm, a 180mm, a 300mm, and a teleconverter, which was my usual loadout through the 1990s and early 2000s, I was able to transition to a wide angle zoom on one camera, and a telephoto zoom on the other.

Along those same lines, digital cameras have been getting so much better at handling very low light situations, we could leave the flash and reflectors in the car instead of carrying them on our shoulder.