Lessons

Lesson Info

Transporting Gear

I want to show you some of the other gear I used and how I think about it and importantly how I transported and really deal with with some of this so let's take a look so first off I hate backpacks it can't stand him because when I had a backpack and I used to for many years there would be a mental process in my head that I would see something I want to capture I'd have the wrong lens on it to get it and I would ask yourself is it worth it to take the backpack off to switch that lens and get that shot or is it gonna be too much of a pain to do that and I found that I might be shooting on the edge of a stream or maybe it's a swamp like thing or something else in my backpack would end up on the edge of that and I'm wandering into the pastor whatever it is into change lenses now I gotta walk all the way back to my backpack get the lens walk all the way back into the scene and it just wasn't working for me for some people works great but for me it doesn't here's what I used to transport my...

lenses if you can see what this is but what this is is this is a belt was some suspenders above it and what I do to put lenses onto this belt is I use a little pouches little fabric pouches that each lens goes onto and it gets attached to this belt so let me show you how that works I'm gonna grab a few of the pouches here's one of them this is made by a company called think tank photo this is called a lens changer fifty there's various sizes this is the fifty um and what I do with this is I take a lens in first I prep it for shooting I take the lens cap off I put the lens hood into position okay and I put it uh glass down with the lens hood in position and the glass doesn't touch the bottom of the bag and I put it in there then there's a little pull string on it and I pull that string so that is securely in there it's not coming out and I take one of these for each one of my lenses prep each lens by taking the lens cap off put the land so it around and then putting it in the pouch pull the string and do that for each lens you plan on shooting with on that particular day I also grabbed one spare pouch attempt and I'm just gonna take this belt and I'm gonna attach them on the back of each one of these there's just a little area that I can grab pole and this is where the belt can go and then this closes over the bell with velcro so I'm just going to take this and hopefully do that right put each one on this sure the audio guys are loving that sound you guys listening all right I have three of them currently on here um then what I'm gonna do is take this and put it on all right so I'm just going to pick it up by the suspenders and I'm just gonna put on the suspenders then I'll reach behind me and undo the belt pull around the front and they're all right now I'm ready to go into the field but I put my camera in here as well and this is how I'm out shooting all right so if I'm out this way shooting and by the way you can get a camera strap that would actually attached to these little rings that air here so you wouldn't have it around your neck it would be on the the system but this is what it is I can move these behind me if I need to go through a tight opening looking a slot canyon if I need to sit down on a rock and behind me is something else I can slide them around grabbing them like this moving out so now I could sit there nothing behind me and if I want to change lenses I reach up to one of them noticed I'm not even looking at it and I can feel this little plastic pincher thing I grab it and pull and I reach in and pull out a lens this one I didn't securely have the lens hood on but usually these air prepped not in front of a camera where your life but anyway well this out the lens hood usually stays on no problem and then to change my camera lens I just take one finger here reach over and hit the button and move this lens the tiniest bit just so it's not locked and then I can reach over here and I'm shooting with a different lens now I want a different one I grabbed this pull the plastic thing tau release it reach in my lens out just to the one tiniest little bit a little time if it written slightly in here there's a little flap and you could take this flap put it on top of the lens and then cinch it down and it would make it so the lens is not exposed up here in the top also in the bottom there's a zipper I don't know if it's in here or not but there's a rain bag if it really starts coming down I could put this over the entire bag um I rarely use those rain bags instead down here at the bottom where the rain bag would usually go you could take it out I will put either lens cap or filters that I might end up using so I can use that little storage space this setup makes it so I never have the conversation in my head about do I want to change lenses or not I've already changed it before I thought about it my brain looks at what I see says oh I need a longer lens to pull that background in close and I go over here and grab whatever lens it is switch it out so it makes sense so the on ly uh issue with this is these particular pouches that I standard on standardised on are the fifties they hold most of my lenses all my lenses with the exception of these two long ones they won't fit in the side pouch so for those I have a few options unfortunately the company that makes these stopped making my favorite the pouch for this so I'm evaluating what to use for long lenses they used to make a pouch that was called the with it out in the whip it out would store my long lens of pointed up was just a zipper down the side and I could literally pull it down what what the lens out in a matter of I mean faster than using these things but unfortunately I guess they didn't sell well so they stop making him so instead we have a pouch here this is called the seventy five pop down elsie seventy five pounds down in this land's pouch can handle my lands in there and I think it has a zipper in the bottom where can extend if you have the lens hood on it s so that when you travel you could have this compacted because your lens hood is in storage mode you can unzip it extend its and now with your lens hood it can fit in this takes a little bit of time to get the lens in and out so it's not assert my favorite but it's one solution they also make a different kind of lens pouch still from think tank photo this one is called the skin seventy five pop down skin seventy five pop down the difference is this one is not padded the normal ones air patted which I like because I brush against iraq or tree like to have something between my gear and that this is more if you want absolute lightweight you see doesn't have much structure to it and with it I can put it in and out and it has the same drop down on the bottom that would zip up here if I want it oh I want to compact it but not my favorite solution either because I miss the old one called the whip it out which would allow me I could literally get the lens out faster than I can from these other pouches so I have found this one this is made by a company called spider um if you just search for spider pouch you'll most likely find info on it in the handbook it'll tell you the exact model I just don't have it my head otherwise I'd mention it and this is the most similar thing I could find to what's known as the whip it out uh and it has in fact some improvements over the whip it out but a few things I don't like his well so let me put this on all right what this allows you to do I hope I have it on on the way I think there's a chance I should do more velcro ing there to get completely on but I can take a lens that's long I can't put on the lens hood and put it in here but it's got a zipper down the side so instead of being completely enclosed here we're semi hard to get it in with a zipper down the side it could be open somewhat and you just start with it kind of like this and tilt it down and you get it in then you grab the zipper on the side and zip it up to make it tight eso this can't easily come out and so with that I can have a long lens in to get the lens out and just grab the zipper pull down and then I can pull the lens out and notice I don't have to look down to get it to happen to put it back in I might look down justo aim and I usually put it down like this and then tilt it so that way you're not trying to the aim just right just put it down until it hits tilt it till it's in on a pole the one advantage of this over my old one which was the whip it out is the whipping out wouldn't work if you had the tripod cholera on you to have that off because it mounted the lens upside down but the glass up so this thing wouldn't work but this I don't mind I like in many ways a couple things I don't like about it is that the opening for where the belt goes through is quite tall when what that means is when I take this belt off this has a tendency of flipping around on me it's not tightly held in this exact position see what kind of move up and down and where it connects to the belt is not on the top of this pouch it's a little bit further down and that just makes it when I take this off to get in the car take it off like this clip it behind me and then I take these off you see what's happening with this pouch only how it's dangling like that and by the time I said it in my car and get it back out this thing can easily be flipped upside down so it's less appropriate when it comes to taking it on and off but still pretty nice solution so I'm still I'll probably still buy another three long lens pouches if I don't find him until I find the ideal one but this one is from spider and it's not a bad uh set up so the reason why I have one extra pouch on my belt is because if I use this then when I take with wide angle lens or whatever it is off my camera it's gotta go somewhere in this is the less than ideal place to put it because not really shape for it for a wide angle lens it be sitting down in here and you'd have to really get in weirdly so I leave one empty pouch so that if I'm going to switch to this lens the wide angle lens has a air spot to go when I put this on not saying that's the most ideal setup for everyone but I just found it got me away from the backpack thing which I really was not connecting with it all transport all this stuff this is what I use this is also from think tank photo and it is called the airport international here's what I like about it in particular um first off it's international size which means that it's not as tall this direction as other banks that means that this can fit on mohr planes if you ever go to on a smaller plane usually the overhead bins are much smaller than usual in most camera bags just won't fit the standard size roller but the international version where this is not a stick on and I think it might not even be a stall in the other direction I find fits on the way here I was on a fifty passenger plane and I thought it wasn't gonna fit but I have just had to flip it upside down so the wheels weren't at the bottom it fit in the overhead in a people that were watching we were like well how did you get that to happen in I've had this fit on the kind of plain where there's two seats on one side and one seat on the other I've had it even fit on smaller planes in that were the one seed in each side it's fit on a tremendous number of planes also it's easier to fit underneath the seat because it's a little bit smaller if I can't get it in the overhead bin other good features about the bag that I like is when I'm in my hotel room or just sitting in an airport and it might take a nap you find zip these around there's actually a lock here where I can click the supers into this it'll lock here and so the only way to get in the bag now is to start to destroy the bag you know tto mess with your zippers when I get to my hotel room from the back of the bag there's a zippered compartment in the zipper compartment is a cable where if you have a lock with you I can now lock this around something in my room so the casual thief mean anybody's really committed and there in your room with nobody else there they're going to learn how to get in your stuff but for the casual guy if I'm going to take a nap at the airport you know because we have a four hour layover I might tie this around the the chair that I mattered enough ways where I can lock it to it tio secure that also I used this little compartment in the back to store my backup drive I don't use my draft backup drive I don't want the same cases my laptop because that's where my other copy of my images are if that big it's stolen I don't have my images of that bag it's thrown in water or something I've lost both the backup in the original so I put the backup drive in this little spot it does have the normal you know papa panel and all that but that's called the airport international from think tank photo I'm sure there are other bags that would fit its place but those were some of the things I look for in in the bag