My camera bag “essentials”

With the arrival of my fancy new zoom lens for my camera last week, the bag I was using became too small. I was using a Crumpler 5 Million Dollar home, and it was great for the camera with medium zoom lens attached, and my wide angle lens in the other half of the bag. But the fancy new zoom lens is REALLY BIG, so it wouldn’t fit unless I took the camera out. Not ideal. So I ordered a Crumpler 6 Million Dollar Home, the next size up from the bag I already had. It arrived yesterday, and after an hour of re-arranging, it is finally properly packed with all the essentials in convenient places for accessing lenses and filters and batteries while taking pictures.

It also weighs 10 pounds, according to my scale. Probably because the “essentials” include the following:

• Canon 100-400mm zoom lens (3lbs, all by itself)
• Canon 10-22mm wide angle lens (1.2lbs)
• Canon Digital Rebel XTi (1.5lbs?)
• Canon 28-105mm zoom lens attached to the camera (1lbs)
• 4 compact flash cards
• 2 spare batteries
• 1 lens hood (sun shade) each for the 2 zoom lenses
• 1 UV filter for the wide angle and new zoom lenses
• 1 polarizing filter for the wide angle and new zoom lenses
• 1 polarizing filter for the 28-105mm lens (of course it takes a different size filter)
• plastic rainshield for the camera (basically a plastic bag, but just in case)
• wrist brace (again, just in case)
• cleaning cloth
• mini maglight flashlight
• monopod to support the fancy new zoom lens
• ball head for easy attachment of the zoom lens to the monopod

Ok, so it’s kind of a long list. But everything there really is essential to a photo trip.

Although sometimes I get lazy and I just grab the camera with the 28-105 lens, a couple flash cards, and the small bag.