© Billingham

(update: link to “My Big Small Bag” added; a peak into my per­sonal pack­ing pref­er­ence & mini review)

“Show me the sketch” asked the lady to the boy.

He handed her the sketch and she replied: “Sure, we can make this”

“Really?” asked the boy.

“Why not?” she con­tin­ued. “We have sup­pli­ers and they surely can make cus­tom bags like this.”

“But this isnt really sim­ple, it’s feature-packed, are you sure they can do it?”

“Let’s see.”

The mother took the draw­ing from her 8 year old son, and he never heard from her again about it.

Yupe. The bag was never pro­duced, and the draw­ing was never seen again.

I have been a big fan of bags since I was lit­tle, and I never was happy with the bags that I pur­chased through­out the years. Albeit, school bags, cam­era bags, trav­el­ing bags, only until I was old enough to buy my own bag and actu­ally trav­eled a bit that I was able to get myself some proper bags.

My first cam­era bag was a small, green army col­ored box with plas­tic fit­tings that costed next to noth­ing. When it grew too small, I went out and pur­chased my first seri­ous cam­era bag, the $120 Lowepro Orion AW that was pop­u­lar at that time, and despite some bro­ken zip­per han­dle, the bag stands its rep­u­ta­tion, I still have it in stor­age, and it was a good bag.

When I begin work­ing pros, car­ry­ing my PowerBook for loca­tion shoot became a bur­dain, so I bought myself a multi-purpose back­pack, a khaki col­ored Crumpler knock-off that was not nearly as usable as intended that I ended up using it not as a cam­era bag, but a daily back­pack. So I pur­chased another Crumpler knock-off mes­sen­ger bag, in which the price has proven its unuse­ful­ness, it was dying too fast.

An iPad, a cou­ple of years later, I finally decided to get the real thing, I wasn’t really sure what to get as yet, only to learn that what I need as a bag rel­e­vant to my cur­rent setup was close to noth­ing, at least that’s what I found in the beginning:

• Lightweight, thin & com­fort­able to wear and to carry my daily carry stuff.
• Long last­ing & looks good.
• Capable of intak­ing an iPad plus a small pocket cam­era and/or basic DSLR kit.

Intriqued by the lost bag sketch that never saw the day­light, I began sketch­ing my new ‘dream bag’ design. Think of ShootSac + Crumpler, instead of a detailed ren­der­ing of the bag, I came out with a size & mate­r­ial require­ment, some friends rec­om­mended a few sup­pli­ers that are known to be cus­tom bag mak­ers for pho­tog­ra­phers & users (local), I was excited, and what comes next was a surprise.

I couldn’t remem­ber what was the size/material I decided with and I lost the sketch, none of it was rel­e­vant when I redis­cov­ered Billingham again, after a friend showed me his L2 setup. After doing a lit­tle research, I short­listed the fol­low­ing models:

• Billingham Hadley Original/Pro — Khaki
• Domke F-803

None of it met my size require­ment, but both was a good jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, just when I decided on the Hadley, I saw some­thing else on the shop, the new Billingham f/Stop Range bag, it was love at first sight, I dropped my jaw when I learned that it has the same or not per­fect size — even bet­ter. So I quickly check if my Apple encased iPad fits per­fectly, and the bag’s inner com­part­ment was per­fect in both width & height to fit the iPad.

Featuring Billingham’s com­pos­ite light­weight mate­r­ial FibreNyte cloth, min­i­mal­is­tic design & leg­endary qual­ity, the bag didn’t come cheap, I had to set aside $285 for this beast.

It took me a good few years to under­stand a thing or two about a good bag, and as the title sug­gested, big bag really bugs; mate­ri­als and fin­ish­ing is every­thing a bag can offer, my advise is never to set­tle with less, but qual­ity & build. (Great look doesn’t hurt too).

Why I chose this bag:

• Lightweight, great design & craftsmanship.
• Dedicated iPad friendly space at the rear of the main compartment.
• Just enough addi­tional com­part­ment at the front & back of the bag.
• Bottom & Top are pro­tected with a padded flaps.
• An iPad, basic DSLR kit & a few acces­sories will fit per­fectly in this thing, it’s made for the iPad & dig­i­tal shoot­ers like me.

What I don’t like about this bag:

• The long quick release strap that is a depar­ture from the old design (it’s a love & hate thing, that I hap­pend to dislike).
• Its price tag.