Before you Buy: Choosing a Camera Bag

Shoulder bags make accessing your gear easy and quick, often a good choice for urban photographers. They come in all different shapes and sizes, many of them have the great feature of not looking like a camera bag, which is often appreciated since it attracts less attention from ill-willing citizens. I would recommend brands like Domke and Crumpler if this is what you’re looking for.

The LowePro Nova 5 AW does not fit the above description, it’s a rather large bag and bulky. I personally dislike shoulder bags because I’m not an urban photographer. When I take a bag with me it’s often because I go on long hikes for several hours and shoulder bags tend to be tiresome and not the best solution for my style of shooting.

I use the Nova 5 as a storage bag and it’s a bag that I take with me when I’m going to be shooting on one location and not move around a lot. As you can see it can swallow quite a large amount of gear, in the picture above I have 6 lenses (1 large, 3 medium and 2 small lenses) as well as my Canon EOS 350D with attached grip. Also stored in the main compartment are a set of extension tubes and several filters, in the front compartment I have memory cards, spare batteries, an air blower and other assorted stuff.

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