Selecting the Best Camera Bags for Outdoor Photography

So once you get all of your camera gear the next step is to figure out how to carry all of your stuff. You've got a few basic options. First is what I call a shoulder bag. And a shoulder bag is a very simple bag that carries depending on the size can carry a lot or a small amount of gear. I tend to use the shoulder bags when I'm not moving very far away from the car.

If I'm shooting from a vehicle or if I'm out doing some street photography. The great thing about the shoulder bag is that they're very lightweight. They're very portable. They quite literally just swing over your shoulder and it's very easy to access your gear when you need it. The downside of the camera bag is they're not very comfortable to carry after a long period of time.

And there's really no way to carry your tripod with the with the, the shoulder bag you have to hand hold it. Another type of bag is what I like to call a travel bag. And the travel bag is something that is optimized for traveling long distances on a plane. So this particular bag, which is made by a company called Guru Gear is designed to take a lot of gear on the inside, but still fit in the overhead bin of a standard airplane. So you can see that I've got plenty of room in here for my big wildlife lenses and associated gear as well as a camera, smaller lenses and other miscellaneous gear, the swallows, a lot of gear.

So it's great when I'm traveling internationally it's also comfortable enough to carry around on your back for short periods of time, but it's not really designed for long hiking or anything like that. It's just not gonna support the weight as well as a bag that's more optimized for that which leads us to the third type of bag which is what I call the adventure bag which is a bag of that is designed for long distance hiking. This particular bag is made by a company called F-stop and it's a taller bag. So that way, when you have the bag on your back and you can see there's a waist strap here because it's taller the weight isn't hanging off your shoulders when you have the waist strap and the chest strap set up. It's actually taking the weight off your shoulders.

So you can hike long distances comfortably with this bag. Now this bag is not optimized for travel because of the tall and skinny design. You can't quite cram as much gear in it and it's a little harder to fit in the overhead bin of an airplane as well. But it's very, very useful if you're getting out doing some outdoor adventure and this particular bag has this nice opening here in the back so that when you set your camera bag down on the ground, you can open up the back like this and you're not having your gear in the mud. So it's a really nice design optimized for long distance outdoor travel.