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(Updated with more details.)

There’s a sub­tle dif­fer­ence between a bag and a great, fine bag.

A bag is just a mean to carry your things, the lat­ter is an exten­sion of your soul, one that you trust and would carry all the time, it would walk the great life as you walk the storm across the desert sun, keeps you com­pany from trains to plains, busses to taxis and it becomes bet­ter as you age with it.

I never had a bag that I truly love until I pur­chased this one.

Prompted by the excel­lent blogs Packlite and My Bag is Bad Ass, I thought I’d do some jus­tice and share this lit­tle beauty.

The Big List

1. Billingham f/Stop 1.4
2. Canons EOS 7D with the EF 50mm ƒ/1.4 USM + Standard hood & lens cap.
3. Canon EF 16-35mm ƒ/2.8L USB
4. MUJI vel­cro pouch hous­ing an Apple iPhone 3GS (not pic­tured) & Apple In-ear headphone
5. Starbucks 355ml Lucy Tumbler
6. Non-branded alu­minum shade with cus­tom pre­scribed lens & car­ry­ing box
7. 2x Sandisk 4gb, 8gb CF cards
8. Mentholatum Deep Moist Lip Balm
9. Cocoon Ultralight U-Shaped Air-Core inflat­able pillow
10. Nokia E51 smart­phone (backup, for emer­gency use or local num­ber only)
11. USB — Mini USB cable
12. Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit (encased with the Sandisk CF card case)
13. Homemade all-natural bug & mos­quito repel­lant on trans­par­ent PC bottle
14. Lenspen LP-1
15. Snowman per­ma­nent all-surface marker (black)
16. Moleskine Mini Ruled Notebook
17. Key + Delsey Padlock
18. Modified MUJI card­case with rubberband
19. MUJI Nylon Passport Case
20. Apple iPad 64gb with a mod­i­fied Apple iPad case

More on the Bag

The bag weighs about 5kg with the entire twenty items men­tioned above packed inside (travel mode); it weighs a lit­tle less in urban mode — that is when I’m walk­ing around in the city minus the non-essential, trav­el­ing related stuffs.

The main com­part­ment can be cus­tomized with the stock padded vel­cro sep­a­ra­tors; I par­ti­tioned it in three parts in such a way that I recy­cle the setup as a full-loaded cam­era gear bag, urban day-pack, or a trav­el­ing side-pack. I can put my main cam­era setup when I remove the non-camera essen­tials; the EF 80–200 ƒ/2.8L (the orig­i­nal black) goes where the Lucy Stumbler goes, a SpeedLite 550EX to where my shade box goes, charg­ers, wire­less trig­gers, cables on top of the mid­dle com­part­ment (where the 50mm goes), CF cards, more cables & what­nots are all in the front pocket.

There’s a zip­pered hid­den com­part­ment at the back of the bag, I usu­ally put a sec­ond t-shirt, or papers — e.g. client brief, shoot list, map/papers there. A third t-shirt can also fit on top of the pack, directly under the flap cover.

I’m also not sure if the bag was designed with the iPad in mind, but the iPad fits nicely to the slim com­part­ment between the back and the main com­part­ment of the bag. (I once carry two iPads there with no prob­lem whatsoever.)

The Fine Print

• The prod­ucts listed above may not be the best, but they were care­fully cho­sen to make my life a lit­tle eas­ier, and they tend to work.
• When some­thing isn’t avail­able (not pro­duced or sim­ply don’t exist), I try to look help to taylor-made them, when parts of the prod­ucts are avail­able I see if I can mend them together to make it my own. The MUJI Card Case (#18) and the Apple iPad Case (#20) are good exam­ples; they are hacked together from two dif­fer­ent prod­ucts to make a final shape that I like; the orig­i­nal card case from MUJI doesn’t carry the rub­ber band, and the orig­i­nal Apple iPad Case has frames and tend to make an annoy­ing flap-sound, so I removed the frame and stick them to another third-party case bot­tom to make it thin­ner & ele­gantly frameless.
• The Cocoon pil­low is the best one I’ve tried so far. MUJI makes a very good nat­ural foam multi-purpose pil­low, but is not inflat­able, and other inflat­able travel pil­low isn’t padded, the Cocoon, on the other hand, sort of takes the best of both and makes an inflat­able soft synthetic-fill pil­low with an adjustable, easy-to-blow twist valve and is no more big­ger than a small cof­fee mug when packed to its case.
• The In-ear Apple ear­phone is one of the best hi-fi qual­ity portable head­phone in its class. It also dou­bles as an excel­lent earplug. Gentle han­dling is needed to make sure the rub­ber pads don’t go off when unplug­ging from your ears.
• I rarely have prob­lems in air­port secu­rity check­point for car­ry­ing hot cof­fee or tea with the Starbucks Lucy Tumbler, prob­a­bly due to its lens-like shape and the fact that it is being car­ried inside a cam­era bag next to a real lens. It can keep your hot bev­er­ages hot for hours, and despite its from Starbucks, it is actu­ally really good.
• I like the wide & slim design of the Mentholatum Lip Balm, it doesn’t bulge when you put it in your jeans or the front pocket of this bag while the ‘Deep Moist’ claim really lives up to its promise. Look for the non-menthol version.
• MUJI is my go-to brand for per­sonal ameni­ties & organizing-related stuffs, priced rea­son­ably with good mate­ri­als and work­man­ship, but I per­son­ally admire them for their min­i­mal­ist, no-brand prod­uct pol­icy. Their name in orig­i­nal japan­ese lit­er­ally means: No Brand Quality Products.
• The front pocket can use a lit­tle improve­ment, I put a hard plas­tic inside as a separator/organizer, the pen slides nicely and stands upright for easy access instead of sleep­ing at the bot­tom that tends to be dif­fi­cult to be taken out with­out looking.

As func­tional as this Billingham is, the design goes deeper than skin and great looks alone; at 0.79kg, the syn­thetic canvas-like mate­r­ial — FibreNyte — does an excel­lent job repelling water and not intro­duc­ing holes in my jeans or khaki pants.

I’ve gone cycling, trekking, Airport hop­ping, even kayak­ing with this bag strapped on my shoul­der, the level of pro­tec­tion, usabil­ity and acces­si­bil­ity of this bag is unprece­dented; a back­pack is still nec­es­sary for a multi-day trekking or trav­el­ing (I’m expect­ing my Goruck GR1 soon), though a good back­pack is more com­fort­able for an all-day walk or trekking, it will never be as acces­si­ble as any excel­lent side­pack like this Billingham.

Alas, I’m happy with this pur­chase, and will be so for a long, long time. If you are look­ing for a day pack and price is not a big con­cern (believe me, it won’t!), look no fur­ther, as you won’t see that many min­i­mal­ist bag this good look­ing that actu­ally works very, very well.