The day bag - the choice

Truthfully, I didn't set about finding a day bag with quite such methodical rigour. Rather, I was home with an injured boy, putzing around on Amazon, looking for a new camera bag (due to the afore-mentioned pain-in-the-arse-ness of the current one). But the post-facto justification looks good!

My starting point was looking for a camera bag which could do a lot more than simply hold a camera. It also had to hold all the other gumf I would need, otherwise the camera would get left behind. And given that I've got a fabulous DSLR, the last thing I want is to resort to a point-and-shoot. But I don't need a full-on camera bag capable of holding three lenses and two flashes and a tripod and sixteen filters and all the rest of it.

Amazon had two sling style bags that looked like likely candidates: the Caselogic sling bag and the Lowepro Passport Sling.






In the end, I went with the Lowepro one, simply because I could get it locally and make the necessary modifications before I left. I also felt the Caselogic one still looked a lot like a camera bag, with a lot less flexibility for carrying the other stuff I'd need.

That said, the Lowepro one did not escape the reviews without coming in for some heavy criticism about the design. The three main issues are that the external pockets do not seal in any way, meaning they're not useable; the external pockets are not separated, so things migrate between them; and that there are only two small pockets inside, meaning the rummage factor is likely to get rather high.

So being the good little engineer that I am, I simply sewed zips to the two side external pockets, and stitched along the side seams of the pockets to segregate them properly. Hey presto, two extra zip pockets which are now useable.

(They're a bit industrial-looking, but they were the only zips short enough likely to stand up to the wear and tear.)