A Camera Bag

Nikon D700 with a Nikkor 180mm AF ED f/2.8 lens on a Tamron MC-4 1.4x teleconverter. The focal length of the lens was thus extended to 252mm.

Billingham camera bags. Foreground: Billingham 225; background: Billingham 550. Nikon D90. AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED lens. F/5.

A photograph of a Heritage camera bag made by a company called Team Direct established by former Billingham employees. The company no longer exists; it was taken over by CCS who later got out of camera bag manufacturing. Nikon D2Xs + AF-D Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens.

Not an exact copy of a Domke bag, but close. Bought secondhand from a man who got it new when visiting China, where it was made. Information on the brand is scant on the internet, but it would appear these bags were in production around 2005. www.clubsnap.com/forums/showthread.php?t=158905 There's plenty of capacity and a wonderful floppiness, improved further by jettisoning the velcro'd dividers. A newish Domke bag feels stiff in comparison. This one is khaki green; there was a grey version too. One day my search for the perfect bag will end. I don't know if this particular product is rainproof - I doubt it is - but it has a lot of character. Good gauge canvas and some very sturdy hardware suggest it could be durable. Nikon D2Xs and Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AI lens.

Everything manual, including the lens, a Nikkor-O.C 35mm f/2 on a Nikon D300s. The bag is a Billingham Hadley Original.

Domke F-4AF Pro System camera bag. Nikon D2Xs + AF Nikkor 35-70mm f/2.8 lens.

Four years ago I won an eBay auction for a 2x teleconverter. The seller did not know it was a teleconverter and had advertised it as a 50mm Tokina lens. In fact the only Tokina thing about it was a lens cap and even that was difficult to discern in the awful photographs the seller had posted. It turned out to be a Teleplus NAS Macro MC7 from the pre-autofocus days, designed to appeal to photographers on a budget and wanting to extend the capability of their one and only lens with a close-up macro feature as well as a doubling of its focal length. I had hoped it might be a more up to date version with AF, but no. I haven’t used it much, but I think it was worth the £4.99 I bid. Here it is coupled with a Nikkor 28mm f/2 lens. Camera: Nikon D700.

Camera bag manufacturers prefer to show potential customers photographs of the product in isolation. This is unsatisfactory because the prospective purchaser needs to see the bag with a person to form a reliable idea of bag capacity, size, and appearance. The Limbo Connection occasionally takes action to remedy the deficiencies of the camera bag sellers in their product catalogues and advertising.

Photographed with an old M42 screw lens coupled via an adapter to a Canon digital SLR camera. The subject is a camera bag badged 'Miranda' which was an ebay win in 2012 costing £11 and contained a Nikon FG-20 camera, a Vivitar 28mm f/2.8 lens and a Soligor 80-200mm zoom lens. A lucky day for Limbo. In the early 1980s, the British electrical and photographic retailer Dixons acquired the rights to the Miranda brand and used it on a range of photographic equipment.

This is a detail of a Safrotto canvas camera bag. These bags are made in China and sold extensively in the U.S. market. They seem a good deal less common in the U.K. Safrotto bags - at least this one - are very similar to Domke camera bags. Perhaps Safrotto bought the rights to the Domke designs. Jim Domke created the original bag bearing his name which was so popular that he founded a company in the U.S. to produce them. That was in 1976. In 1990 he sold his company to a firm called Saunders. Saunders sold the operation to a big American photographic company called Tiffen in 1999. However, Tiffen went bankrupt in 2003, and Topspin bought their assets, including Domke bags. The company continues trading under new ownership, but this is yet another example of the name surviving for marketing purposes. On the web you can find customers' complaints about the deterioration in the quality of Domke camera bags in recent years. They claim that the canvas is thinner and that some of the fittings are now plastic. Some comment that the Safrotto lookalikes are made using better materials, and with small design improvements, at a cheaper price. If they are to be believed, the Safrotto bags are more like Jim Domke's original than the current offerings from Tiffen. I don't know if this is the case. I bought this bag to see if Safrotto products were decent, and because it was blue, and because it was a secondhand bargain. The bag seems reasonable; not built like a Billingham bag, but many times cheaper new or used. The velcro dividers are a disappointment but better than nothing. I don't yet know how it holds up in the wet, nor how it wears. Domke bags have straps which often wear badly, so that might be a weak point. If you need a camera bag, and you like blue denim jeans that are faded with much wear and laundering, and you favour simplicity in design, you might very well enjoy using a bag like this one.

Photographed with a Nikon D700 and Tamron AF 70-210mm f/2.8 SP LD lens. This lens was in production from 1992 to 2003. The Billingham 550 camera bag was introduced in 1983 as a reworking of the 1979 System 1 bag, the first soft camera bag manufactured in Britain. It has remained in continuous production. It is a bag much favoured by professional photographers. The bag is made of canvas and leather, and internally there is nylon covered padding. It is spacious enough to hold at least two camera bodies with a full load of lenses and other accessories. Doing that would, of course, be a mistake. You would end up with an over-stuffed bag which was too heavy to carry and too full to find what you wanted. The bag alone weighs over two and a half kilos. It’s a specialised, well-made and stylish piece of luggage. You can attach additional pockets at either end. I prefer to leave my pair at home. They make the bag look too long. One reason professional photographers like it is its internal height of 10 inches which allows tall lenses and hammerhead flashguns to be stowed upright. Another reason might be the fairly slim profile compared, for example, to a box-like Billingham 555, or indeed any of the Billingham five series which tend to hang from the shoulder four-square like wooden cabinets (and they’ll always do this if they’re filled to capacity). Many camera bags are built square and get in everybody’s way. The 550 will get in everybody’s way anyhow, despite not being square. It’s just generally big. Access is a bit awkward but in my experience that is a general criticism of Billingham bags and a concomitant of high standards of gear-protection. To carry it by hand you have to do up the straps which secure the cover to the bag, which is a nuisance. The only other criticism is the price. Mine is second-hand, with plenty of wear left in it, yet it cost more than many new bags. If you want a real fright, look up the cost of a new one. Don’t confuse it with the 555. Google ‘Billingham 550’. Be sure you’re sitting down when you do this.

A Safrotto copy of a Domke F-2 bag, and surprisingly good. The shoulder pad is from the Billingham range; otherwise all original. Jim Domke created the original bag bearing his name which was so popular that he founded a company in the U.S. to produce them. That was in 1976. In 1990 he sold his company to a firm called Saunders. Saunders sold the operation to a big American photographic company called Tiffen in 1999. However, Tiffen went bankrupt in 2003, and Topspin bought their assets, including Domke bags. The company continues trading under new ownership, but this is yet another example of the name surviving for marketing purposes. On the web you can find customers' complaints about the deterioration in the quality of Domke camera bags in recent years. They claim that the canvas is thinner and that some of the fittings are now plastic. Some comment that the Safrotto lookalikes are made using better materials, and with small design improvements, at a cheaper price. If they are to be believed, the Safrotto bags are more like Jim Domke's original than the current offerings from Tiffen. Safrotto bags are made in China and sold extensively in the U.S. market. They seem a good deal less common in the U.K. I bought this one second-hand for £6, which represented the bargain of the year for me. It’s every bit as sturdy as Domke bags I have previously owned, including an F-2 Emerald and an F-4AF, but as they too were second-hand, I never knew under whose ownership those bags were made. Although some Safrotto products are very similar to Domke camera bags, they are not marketed with the same model designations. I have read on the web that at some point in the troubled history of bankruptcy and changes of ownership, Safrotto bought the rights to the Domke designs. One contributor remarked that the Domke name owners have never brought any legal action against Safrotto, which would be odd if they were making unauthorised copies. Instead they had some text on their web site for a couple of years asking viewers not to buy the "inferior knock-offs". Photographed with a Nikon D700 and a Nikkor O.C 35mm f/2 lens, factory converted to AI capability.

Not so cold that I needed the scarf, so I tucked it in the corner of the camera bag, a Safrotto Domke-inspired design discovered on eBay a while back. The internal dividers which came with the bag were a bit unwieldy and so I have jettisoned them and inserted a Billingham SuperFlex. As you can see, cramming the scarf in dislodged the SuperFlex. I have remarked before that choosing a camera system is child's play compared to settling on a camera bag. Photographed with a Nikon D700 and a Tamron AF 70-210mm f/2.8 SP LD lens.

Subject: Billingham camera bag. Lens: Nikkor-O.C Auto f/2 made in Japan between 1973 and 1975. Subsequently converted to AI standard. Camera: Nikon D700.

Close-up of Billingham 550 Khaki-Tan bag taken with Nikon D50 and Nikkor 20mm f/3.5 AI-S lens with added supplementary lens no.4T.

Canon EOS 30D and Chinon 55mm f/1.4 lens.

Nikon D700 + Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 AI lens.

Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire: The Brew House. The Brew House, as it is known, in the courtyard of Lacock Abbey was one of the additions made by Sir William Sharington when he acquired the building in 1539. Previously Lacock was a monastery. It was secularised after the Reformation. People of the sixteenth century drank beer in preference to water because it was safer. The Brew House was sympathetically restored during the 1970s, having lain derelict for many years. The equipment would still be capable of brewing beer if desired, but it would not be to the standards of the modern brewing industry. However reviled some of today’s makers of beer have the misfortune to be, the absence of hygiene would not be a criticism they would expect to endure. Photographed with a Nikon D700 and a Nikkor 20mm f/3.5 AI-S lens.