Geeky Ramblings

Over the years, I’ve owned a number of camera bags … some better than others. I thought I would take a few minutes and give you a rundown on the camera bags I’ve seen and what I thought of them.

The first bag I had was a Tamrac 515 … it’s a nice little bag that can comfortably hold a single camera with a longish lens. Nothing more than a 300mm zoom though. It’s got a pocket in the front to hold film or filters. It also has a see thru pocket in the top for other accessories. This bag worked quite well for me when I only had a single lens and not a lot of accessories.

After I started purchasing more lenses, filters, and other accessories that I needed to carry with me, I figured a new bag was in order. I looked at a number of bags, but decided that the Tamrac Explorer was a good choice. This bag has partitions to hold a SLR camera body with a short lens, plus spaces on the sides for other lenses and accessories. It also has a nice zip open top cover for easy access. The front pocket has space for filters, memory cards, and such.

Once I started getting even more accessories, I found that the Explorer wasn’t quite big enough. Time to find another bag.

My first thought was to get a backpack style camera bag … something that could hold a lot of accessories. I gave the Tamrac Expedition a try. While this bag certainly has a lot of space available, I found it cumbersome to use. There was no really easy & quick way to get to the camera without unslinging it from your back and unzipping it. I was worried that items in the bag were going to fall out (which is obviously not good for things like lenses).

Since I only had the Expedition two weeks, I decided to return and try something else. When the sales person handling the return asked why, I explained what I didn’t like about the Expedition. He recommend I try one of the new Tamrac Velocity bags. Plenty of space, easy to carry, and easy to access items inside.

I haven’t had a chance to use the Velocity much yet … but I think it’s got good potential.

Back in October, I wrote about having forgot to clean the filter on my camera … well, it turns out that the stain on my filter wasn’t actually causing the spot on my pictures.

There was actually a stain on the filter… but the spot on the pictures was actually being caused something on my cameras CCD sensor.

I didn’t realize what the problem was until I took pictures with different lenses.

I took the camera to Wolf Camera (where I purchased it) to get it fixed. Hopefully all I have to do is pay the $65 cleaning fee.

Update 4/25: Sadly, Wolf hasn’t finished the cleaning … I’m getting kind of antsy, as there have been a number of nice days I would have liked to go out and taken pictures. I called today to check on the status, but they couldn’t tell me much. The guy who normally deals with repairs & such is out.