I don’t do a lot of event photography, though one of my first blog posts was about shooting cos-playing vikings in Abbotsford. However, when my buddy Jeff invited me to come out and help out with a United Way Kick-Off fundraiser in downtown Vancouver, how could I say no? My day job gracious gives us time off for volunteer work, so I booked the day off and tonight have been getting myself ready, and thought I’d talk a bit about what goes into my camera bag for something like this.
First of all it’s a matter of which bag. I have an old LowePro bag which fits my camera and a spare lens, but not a lot else. I also have a full on Jack Bauer like man-purse, but the trade off for it having a ton of space is it doesn’t offer a lot in protection for camera gear.
My awesome wife got me the Passport Sling for Christmas, but sadly I haven’t been able to use it because the combination of my camera body and favourite long lens is too tall to fit in properly. However after a bit of experimentation (and after 9 months of it sitting there unused on my desk) I simply moved one of the inside wall partitions to allow me to move the lens over a bit and allow everything to close down properly.
So for the day of shooting, I brought (and I’m sure over-brought):
- My camera body and wide angle to mid-range lens for general crowd shots, wide angle funky shots, and overall establishing shots
- My portrait zoom lens for portraits and isolating people in the crowd, or long range “street photography”
- Two flashes (in case one conks out)
- A battery grip for the camera body
- A fistful of AA batteries for the flash
- Another spare battery for the camera
- My camera strap with lots of spare memory cards
- My newly purchased Flash Bender=21) to hopefully give a little bit of interesting fill light when making pictures of people and the other volunteers
That’s a lot of gear for a day of shooting! It’s also amazing that it all fits inside the little (well, now bulging at the sides) camera bag. Here’s a couple of shots of what it looks like.
And all buttoned up.
