Camera Bags - My Design

So as anyone who takes pictures will know, photographers are never satisfied with just one bag....I know I've gone through several before I even figured out what it is I wanted, and then it doesn't exist. Someone knowing my grief forwarded me on to a contest put on by Kata to design a custom bag and if you win they'll make it for you and give you a bunch of other stuff.

This is my stab at the design. I've never been able to find a day-to-day bag for going around the city or to small events with that's fashionable, not too bulky, and doesn't look like a camera bag. I usually go with random bags that I find, through a towel in the bottom and hope for the best. This is my take on solving the solution.

But I do need your vote (and hopefully 5 stars) to make it to the next stage.

Unfortunately you do need to register to vote. But if you don't have a throw away email address you should make one for these types of things and other things where you're worried about spam. Please note, you must register like you're going to submit a bag, you just don't have too. In exchange for your vote I offer you these steps to create a throw away filter in gmail:

a)go to settings
b)go to filters - > create new filter
c) in the "to" field type username+reg@gmail.com (so if my email was alex I'd type alex+reg@gmail.com)
d) "next step"
e)check "skip the inbox" and "apply the label" and create a new label titled "registrations"
d)"create filter"

Now when you use your email address use username+reg@gmail.com, the email sent to that address will skip your inbox and automatically be labeled, so if you need to see if you got something you can check it.

Thanks for your 5 stars!: http://www.kata-bags.com/kataDBC/root/showBag.asp?id=1077

and here's the design:

So many people say to buy an apple...

Debbie and I went down to Charlottesville, VA for our Anniversary last month and it was apple picking season. It was great being able to just use my camera without the over lurking fear of giving a client a screwed up product...of course I'm not sure if that's worse then giving my wife a screwed up product. More in another post about the place we stayed, this one is all about the apples.


I knew I wanted to grab a picture of Debbie, and although it wasn't completely planned to do a multi-framed image, I new that her nack for goofy expressions would come in handy. She has since given up on not getting her picture taken and has learned to just live with it as she knows I'm never going to make her look bad (not that I could if I tried).

I had a manfrotto 682B mono-pod with me that afternoon that I got used off of ebay. It's a little large for my taste, but it has little legs that come out the bottom if unscrewed so it can double as portable light stand when needed, although I wouldn't trust my kit on it without me very close. To this I screwed a justin clamp (the if I can only take one thing with me doo-dad) and put a lumiquest SBIII on the flash head and gelled it with a small amount of CTO, you can see this WB effect based on the blue shadow on her shadow side cheek.

I brought the whole thing in real close just out of the frame to the left. The lighting wasn't incredibly consistent with a few hot spots here and there. My excuses include: the wind blowing, the people we were holding up, and a lot of apples to hold, so I had to work quick. But in reality, I probably only notice them in comparison to each other. You can tell the effect of the flash based on the one in the middle which was shot sans flash continuous shooting to ensure I caught the right amount of apples in the air....again...there's only so many times you can get Debbie to pick up that many apples.

A couple ambient only shots: