New Backpack, My Bags, Their Content
Camera backpacks and bags serve trips whether local or long distance. They also serve storage needs at home, but while the two have a lot in common, plenty sets them apart.
A Good Bag
It’s been a year, perhaps, since my son bought me a backpack specifically made for carrying cameras and photography equipment. The bag is separated into three chambers with zippers allowing access on each side and a flap on top. I had been thinking about getting a camera backpack for a while.
To give you a little breakdown of the history leading to the backpack, when I sold my entry level Nikon D60 DSLR at the end of 2015, I had decided it was time to buy a refurbished Nikon D7100. I had already bought a brand new f/4 Nikkor 200mm zoom, and a new Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8, which I had refurbished at half its original cost after it suffered water damage. (It still works like new all these years later.) Soon, I wanted to house equipment properly in a good bag.
I had bought a camera bag brand new in 2011 for about $50.00. As I remember, it’s zipper already gave me trouble by late 2018, and in general—the bag had worn, badly. I bought a Cannon bag—even though all my equipment is Nikon or fit for Nikon—because I could find nothing better online. All these years later—no complaints!
My wife and I fly fairly frequently but always economy, so I needed a bag 17x10x9 inches. A personal item. The Cannon fits the regulations exactly. It cost me $80,00, and it’s proven to have been a good deal. All these years later, the zipper shows no sign of wear and every compartment is spiffy. The bag looks clean and unworn.
It doesn’t house all my equipment. I’ve bought more since the time I bought the bag in January 2019. The D7100 and the kit lens from my D60 fit in a small bag. When I sold the D60, I sold only the body, wisely keeping the kit lens. As I’ll disclose in a moment, it certainly is a keeper. But having bought, in January 2019, a Nikon D850, I did need more space than one bag. I had looked for a refurbished model, but since I couldn’t find one, I bought one brand new from New York. The D850 arrived on the market in 2017, so at the time, it was still very fresh on the scene. I believe I bought mine from B&H, though I have bought equipment from Adorama. I also ordered an additional couple of prime lenses—a 50mm f/1.8 Nikkor and Sigma Art f/1.4.
Capture a Thought
The Sigma I’ve really grown to love. There are situations shooting landscape when that lens produces results that make me think it reached out and wrapped itself around the scene as if to fit my deepest thought perfectly. After all, that’s what landscape photography should do, capture a thought. When you encounter a landscape, you do more than see it. You conceive of how you want it portrayed. That cognitive element is an intellectual beholding of what you confront. Because the scene we set our focus upon when we’re out shooting is more than something separate from us. It expresses the deep unity with the wild we go out and seek for ourselves. Otherwise, landscapes would be alien to us, and if that were the case few would compel us to get involved.
Offhand, I can think of an exception. If we’re interested in reflecting something remote, certain landscapes present themselves as strange and forbidding. I think of certain barren winter shots I’ve taken at Round Valley near Lebanon, New Jersey. Most of the Valley is wild and wonderful, rather than anything domestic and tamed. Allow the like to be the emergence of your own inner response. Landscape photography allows a larger, broader, and as I say, even alien, self to emerge. If no one else can appreciate it, at least you work to bring it out in your own photographs. And sometimes even summer scenes offer a forbidding pose, as the photograph below might suggest. You can barely tell it is summer.
In my experience, another lens, the Tokina 11-16 f/2.8 does have its moments. Even for a my full frame camera, though it’s built for crop cameras. I just back off from opening it to its widest range, which creates vignetting in the corners. I think I’m good from about 14-16mm. I get a very wide shot with a crisp clarity from the edges and burrowing into the middle of the frame as if every detail is embraced. But I use the Sigma Art a lot more, even though I use my 50mm the most.
Having used the Sigma Art on my D850, I tried to bring out Round Valley’s inherent dark quality, though I not only refused to compromise the quality of light that seems natural, I appreciate the whitish rocks in the foreground complementing the clouds in the upper right of the frame. You can see white reflections of clouds on the water to the right, also.
Kit Lens
In my bag, I carry all the lenses I’ve mentioned, and a Nikkor 70-200mm f/4 with vibration reduction I have a hard time remembering to keep under my control. I do use the lens a lot. And sometimes on my D7100. You might have wondered where I store that. Well, I have another bag for it, which I might have mentioned sooner, but photography, once I begin to think about it, interests me so much I can’t help but digress.
It’s a tiny bag. It fits the D7100 with the Nikkor 18-55mm “kit” lens on it perfectly, but it will carry the little 50mm prime as well, though in recent times, I never use that lens on the crop camera. I am amazed at how well the kit lens performs. It is sharp. No aberrations. I even got a shot well after sundown on a frozen lake—of rocks on a mound about a foot higher than the ice—with colorful light behind mountains in the background. Despite the crop camera’s being known to be less fit for low light than the full frame D850 (amazing at low light), and despite the “lesser” quality of the kit lens, I think the image I got works.
Kit lens! I think the only difference is that the body is made of plastic. Obviously the D7100 is pretty good for low light, too.
Lots of Crop Camera Use
When I bought the D850, I put the D7100 up for sale for $300.00 or $350.00 on eBay, but it was taking forever to attract a buyer, and in the meantime, I was beginning to find some use for it. When I took it off the market, I did so on no uncertain terms and felt greatly relieved it hadn’t sold! I fish constantly, and not only do a lot of fishing situations call for no more than a very small camera bag, the Nikon D7100 is an excellent camera in its own right, and I soon found uses for it while hiking, as well, getting over the snobbery that can attend the ownership of an expensive D850. I no longer feel one camera is better than the other, so much as that I have different uses for each. An image like the one above makes feel proud of my D7100.
I can put the D850 in the little bag, and on seldom occasion, I have, but it weighs a lot more and tends to defeat the purpose. When I fish and can find space for the Cannon bag in a boat or large canoe, I invariably take it along. I get photos published in outdoor publications I write for, and I don’t need to shoot large, 46 megapixel, 70mb or so images. I select small RAW + Basic images. The RAW is about 10 megapixels and 22 or 24mb. The Basic jpg is about one megabyte, and I’ve been using some of them for blog posts when I feel the quality is sufficient. Now that I’ve discovered recently that deleting images from Lightroom and my disc is a cinch, I’ve been shooting only RAW.
I’m not exactly the most practical photographer. Yes, it took me forever to figure that out about Lightroom, but then again, I used Lightroom 6 until November last year, when I began the subscription service. Besides being a little slow when it comes to post-processing, I select large images when I’m trying to achieve the likes of the Round Valley photograph, above. The D850 gives me choices between Small, Medium, and Large RAW files. (The D7100 has only one 24 megapixel RAW size option.) As I was trying to get at, I have no use for the Large files other than to publish them at 72 DPI in my blog, collect prints, and dream on about getting books of images published. Most of what I shoot gets deleted. I only keep what I really want to keep. A hard drive can fill very fast if you’re not critical about what you want.
The D7100 allows me to shoot RAW + Basic jpgs, also. It allows other options I’m not in the habit of using. The 24 megapixel RAW images are about 32mb, so besides the convenient little jpgs I’ve worked with for my Litton’s Fishing Lines Blogger blog, the RAW files are a little less convenient than the small D850 RAW files. when small files are all I need. As I said before, though, the camera weighs less and is significantly easier to carry.
Hiking
For hiking, the backpack my son gave me is far better than slinging the big bag over my shoulder. It gets weighty when carrying additional lenses, but if you’re going to bring them, this is the best way to do it. My wife and I have already begun our fall hiking, and I’ve carried my camera in the backpack on two hikes thus far. We plan on hiking into the back of Round Valley Reservoir. I’ve collected thousands of photos over the past decade from Round Valley, and ever since I bought the D850, it’s the only camera I’ve used there. All of them large RAW files. The reservoir reached record low levels for four years, allowing magnificent landscape photography. I shot almost weekly and never saw another photographer with a tripod. That’s why I believe I have a unique collection. So, in keeping with the standard, while I won’t carry in the tripod to the back of the reservoir—even though it’s carbon, it’s heavy—I will pack in the D850 and possibly two lenses.
While the backpack will be the sole reason I can use my D850 with various lenses in the back of the reservoir, I still prefer to use my bag when I can. Switching out lenses is easier. Just unzip the top and all of them are there for you. As I’ve said, my backpack’s compartments amount to one set on top of the other accessible from the sides as well as the top’s compartment being accessible from the top, so that you reach in from the side while positioning it on the ground. No terrible difficulty, but I wouldn’t want to risk a mishap while on a pitching boat. The bag is stable with the lenses facing upward. The bag’s allowing availability from the sides means some of the lenses might roll out.
I’ve used the backpack only a couple of times as yet, when hiking onto the jetty at Barnegat Light. I’ll be doing that again soon, as well. It’s much more comfortable than trying to shoulder strap the big Cannon bag and haul that in. With the herniated discs in my back, hauling that bag is a serious liability.