bags - page 4

Gadgets! Camera bag crafters know that, these days, if you’re carrying photo stuffs, you’re likely also bringing some kind of computer, and other electronic knick-knacks, along for the ride.

A lot of bags concede that means a small Macbook Pro or Air will need a lift, but Lowepro’s Event Messenger 150 bag knows true technorati stroll with only the essentials: a lens or two, a camera body, and an iPad. So that’s what the sleek-looking Event Messenger 150 (EM 150) was built to transport. I took it for a spin to see how it performs.

Another handy-dandy iPad case for your this lovely Monday morning, this time one which converts into a shoulder bag or even a "backpack." It’s called the Across, and it really does look pretty useful.

With an urban, brushed-metal look, premium construction, and space for your camera and Macbook Air or 13″ Pro, Acme Made’s Montgomery Street Backpack is no doubt a great day pack for city walkers. Its side-sitting camera pouch is the standout feature of this bag, though, allowing quick retrieval of your mirrorless cam or DLSR without having to take the bag off.

The Montgomery however, while well suited for those with petite electronics and a taste for the more hipster things in life, mightn’t perform as well for those with a larger Mac, a full size DSLR, or a fear of wearing a pack so cute the girlfriend might want to borrow it.

Sometimes, a product can really sneak into your heart. Such was the HEX Drake Origin backpack, which I gave a positive review.

Although I loved it from the first for being a backpack that a fashionably-inclined, full-grown man could wear without looking like a slobbering, buffoonish manchild — no mean feat — the Drake Origin has become even fonder to me in the months since, until I found that I was more inclined to hoist it up onto my shoulder as I left the house than I was some of my other cherished messenger and satchel bags.

What I loved about the HEX Drake Origin wasn’t just its incredibly solid stitching and construction, but the way it made me feel when I picked it up, I felt as if I suddenly went back in time, and becamed a dandyish Oxford student in the 1910s lugging a tweed backpack full of natural philosophy texts across a blustery, autumn-strewn quad. This may seem precious, and is in fact precious, but the way we all look at fashion is through the romanticized lens of nostalgia. Fashion is a way we tell other people a story about ourselves, and I liked the story I thought the HEX Drake Origins told about me.

I don’t feel the same way about the HEX Cabana Laptop Duffel, but it’s not really the bag’s fault. If the Drake turned me into an Oxford student from a hundred years ago, the Cabana Laptop Duffel turns me into that Oxford student’s girlfriend on a day out at the beach. It’s a very feminine bag that I love, but perhaps not the right bag for me.

This is the Bison Tote, and it’s just about the hottest laptop/camera bag ever. Unless, of course, you’re a bison. Why? Because the bag is made from bison skin.

Face it. Camera bags are dorky as all get-out. I avoid them entirely, either dropping my camera into the pocket of a regular bag with a pair of woolen socks underneath for padding (true, and it works great in my Rickshaw Zero Messenger) or putting it and its accessories into a padded liner that slips into any other bag I might want to use.

But Manfrotto (Bogen in the U.S) has hit on the formula for cool camera bags. The secret? Calling them “Stile” bags and taking photos of them being used by young people in leather jackets.

If it isn’t already obvious: I’m a huge bike nut. I’ve sold bikes, fixed them, raced on them and even slept on one once (hey, cycling is tiring). So I get pretty excited when fellow bike nuts make something ingenious that’ll let my bike haul my Apple gear. Case in point: Timbuk2’s new Basket Case duffel and their Cog Pannier.

One type of bag was conspicuously missing from the lineup when Pelican released its ProGear line a few months back. There was a smorgasbord-like selection of tablet- and laptop-toting bags — but nothing for camera gear. Now Pelican has filled that space, integrating their vault-like case technology in the new S130 ProGear laptop/camera backpack.

You know those cool old waxed canvas bags which used to keep things dry before miners discovered nylon in a cave in Papua New Guinea¹? Now you can make your own! Well, technically you could always make your own. But now Photojojo has provided a guide for you. Spoiler: it’s dead easy.

Having all but dumped my iPad for an iPad mini, I’m now back in the bag dating pool, searching for the perfect match for my little friend and his favorite accessories.

The Polly bag certainly isn’t that perfect match – it’s a girls’ bag and it’s for the big, ugly retina iPad – but when it turned up on my dating radar I figured that it’s totally worth a look.

We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again — simply because we enjoy repeating things: STM makes a %@$# great bag. And they’ve just unveiled a revamp of their flagship bags in the form of a new family of gear they’re calling the Velocity Collection. Which is actually pretty damn apt for this line of fast, light, grab-and-go bags.

Back when I lived in SoCal, I was fixated with the coast. The sand, the surf, the sailboats. In fact, I often sailed out of Oxnard, a sleepy seaside burb just north of Los Angeles, which also happens to hide Mac-friendly bag-maker HEX.

Makes sense, then, that they’d launch the nautically themed Cabana collection, a heavily striped gathering of MacBook carriers and cases, and even an iPhone case. And nothing says “boating” more than a copious helping of stripes. But the bags aren’t just all about looks; they’re also all constructed of tough, water-resistant waxed canvas. I can practically hear the seagulls.

STM has just busted out a whole new range of tech-carrying bags, from small purse-a-likes to hefty schlep-it-all backpacks. But the one I fancy most out of the new lineup is the Velo 2, and not just because it sounds like you’re meant to use it while riding a bike.

Curious (and completely unresearched) fact: Bike geeks are often photography nerds, too. And so it makes perfect sense that Chrome — the messenger bag company — should put out a camera bag. So if you have been looking for an overprotective, heavy camera backpack with a U-Lock holster, the Niko Camera Pack could be for you.

You know what I hate? Detangling the cables, chargers, headphones, and other electronic accoutrements that always weave themselves into a ball while stored in my backpack.

Cocoon, makers of the Grid-It “ultimate organizer,” want to solve that problem. The Grid-It ($20), stows your accessories against a flat surface, all held tidily in place with a series of interwoven elastic bands. That sounds a heckuvalot better than what I’m doing. So with Earpods, chargers, and lightning cables in hand, I put one to the test to see how well it works.

As an Apple guy with a whole lot of photography gear, I’m usually forced to slug my computing devices in one bag and DSLR and accoutrements in another while traveling. I hate doing that.

Think Tank’s new rolling camera bag, the Airport Navigator ($249), with two wheels, a telescoping handle, and space for a DSLR, lenses, and an iPad and Macbook Pro, seemed to be the perfect portable home for all my devices to live. But how well would it perform on the road? I decided to pack it full, take it to Vegas, and cart it around with me on the over-crowded floors one of the world’s biggest technology shows, CES 2013, and find out.

Rickshaw, maker of most of my favorite bags, is hawking this neat new sack on Kickstarter. It’s a version of the venerable Zero Messenger bag, with the addition of a glowing LED strip along the back.

Could it be that, after spending a lifetime looking, I have finally found the perfect bag? Of course not. There’s no single bag that can perform every task.

But I might just have found the perfect day-to-day backpack. It’s the medium Velo from Rickshaw Bagworks in San Fransisco, and it’s pretty damn awesome.

If you want a waterproof bag, forget about zippers, velcro, or any other kind of fastening. What you need is a roll-top bag – just ask Ortlieb, the king of waterproof gear.

The same goes for gadget bags, and Smithfly’s Digi-Pouch offers a tight-sealing, easy-access home for your cameras, iPhones and anything else you want to keep dry.

The PocoWool might have the worst Kickstarter video yet seen, making the clothes-fitting-room scene in Pretty Woman look like a Jim Jarmusch movie, but it looks to be the hottest iPhone bag/purse/clutch around.

Although a bag fancier, there have not been many backpacks in my life that I have cared for. There was a plastic Optimus Prime knapsack when I was six that was pretty boss, and I traveled through over three dozen countries in my early 20s lugging around an 80 pound rucksack, but otherwise, backpacks are the accomplice of unpleasant memories: of inexplicable and unpublished high school rules of coolness dictating the correct number of straps to use in order to silently advertise your relative merit on the cosmic scale of “phat”-ness; of bags torn from my shoulders by laughing cromagnons and tossed into open sewers.

Worse? I think backpacks look dumb on adult men. I know there’s a vocal brotherhood who thinks that any bag on a man looks dumb, but at least I know that a messenger bag or satchel is as much a conscious fashion decision as it is a utilitarian method of hauling around your stuff. A backpack, though, makes even the most slender-of-hip, effortlessly dressed and stubbled metrosexual look as if he were a be-moobed 13 year old gasping and wheezing his way home after school with a backpack overstuffed with text books and X-Men comics. And I should know, because I was that 13 year old.

But backpacks have their purpose, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a little more enamored with their practicality. They are easier on the back, and easier to lug around while biking. If only they didn’t look so ridiculous.

Enter the HEX Drake Origin, a fashionable backpack with a slim form factor that is none the less big enough to fit a 15-inch MacBook, and even has a dedicated pocket for a 10-inch iPad. This is a backpack I not only like; I’m not embarassed to wear it.

Believe it or not, Black Friday has already come and gone. Pretty soon the Christmas season will begin, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.

Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.

From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts for the good gentleman in your life.

Finally, a bag which will suit the every need of our esteemed deputy editor John Brownlee. The Brixton is a leather camera bag with a wax finish that will only become more beautiful as it is used, and used it will be, as Mr. Brownlee has an unnatural obsession with natural materials.

Camera bags are like iPad cases and murses — you can never have enough, and you can never find the perfect one. Now Kata, maker of some fine and very functional camera bags, has thrown yet more confusion into the mix with a unique new lens-storage solution.

The Kata Revolver-8 has a spinning section that lets you load lenses like you would load bullets into a gun.

The Patagonia MiniMass commuter bag ($69) is my first taste of Patagonia’s gear, and I’ve always wondered if their stuff was worth the hype. The company has a bit of a reputation — perhaps fair, perhas not — as the outdoor industry’s bourgeois player, probably due to generally higher prices than the competition, an innovative design ethic and the use of green materials throughout their line.

But Patagonia has also spawned a fanatical following. I once worked with someone who literally camped outside the company’s Southern California headquarters (it sits literally right aross the road from the beach) in the hopes she’d be hired. She wasn’t, but toting around my tablet in the the fantastic little MiniMass let me grasp why she tried.

The MiniMass is the smallest sibling in Patagonia’s family of courier bags (all of which end in “Mass” — a nod to the Critical Mass bicycle movement). This makes the MiniMass a perfect tablet carrier. And even though it isn’t explicitly to ferry tablets, it excels in the task.