The bag that can hold a ton of sh*t
Ever since I started photography a decade and a half ago, I've been always on the hunt for the perfect bag to haul all my stuff around and just like how my gear evolves over time, my requirements for the perfect do-everything bag changes as well. I started with one those ugly obviously-a-camera-bag boxy shoulder bags during for my Nikon D70s era. I upgraded to a what I thought was cool, a Think Tank Sling-o-matic 30, when I had my D7000, Tokina 11-16, 17-55 and 70-200 VR 1 combo and now that I have a Canon 5DmkIII and a random collection of lenses, I wanted a bag that can carry ALL of that plus my laptop so I ended up looking like a Ninja Turtle with a Crumpler Karachi Outpost. I never really liked how awkward it looked but hey, it carried everything plus a mini bottle of Jameson.
So one day, I was hanging out Alex Wong of Emotive Image talking about the previous night's drunken shenanigans when he pulled out a Think Tank Shapeshifter. And like a circus clown car, proceeded to unload a hilarious amount of gear out of a relatively small looking amount of physical space. What I thought was black magic was actually the clever design of the bag; instead of storing gear upright in partitioned slots, you put them in pouches. "But that doesn't make any sense?" you might ask, so I took some snapshots of my fully loaded shapeshifter and one with it emptied it out.
Hey, it looks like a normal backpack loaded with heavy overpriced textbooks! That's the beauty of this thing because no one wants to steal a backpack full of heavy overpriced textbooks.
Looks pretty normal and uninteresting that anyone passing by you while you have your bag open and laid wouldn't look twice to what looks like an overprepared camping trip.
But then take out the lenses and all of the sudden you realize there's still a little bit of storage space left for a mini Jameson bottle next to the 50mm f/1.2.
And once you have all that gear pulled out, you can collapse it into an even thinner backpack:
And here's what I've manage to fit in this bag:
Likes
Dislikes