The Limbo Connection's photos with the keyword: kit bag

The camera bag is a Billingham 550 model. 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. The camera is a Nikon D700 and the lens is a Tamron AF 70-210mm f/2.8 SP LD. This lens was in production from 1992 to 2003. The photograph was made using some quite cheap second-hand kit: an AF Zoom-Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.3-5.6G lens on a Nikon D50.

For the photographer there are specific-purpose bags: rainy day bags; anti-pickpocket bags; bags which do not look like camera bags for use in tough neighbourhoods; slim-profile bags for carrying in crowded areas; bags to inspire confidence at an important event you've been hired to shoot; bags so impossibly large you use them as a supply depot where your other bags call to make changes to their contents; bags which are devoted to specialist items like flashguns or filters; medium-format bags; 35mm film camera bags; digital camera-with-lens-fixed-always bags; soiled bags that you don't mind using in dirty conditions ... the list is endless. The more camera bags I try - all sourced from eBay, the world's greatest lending library, where sometimes it's even possible to turn a modest profit on short-term acquisitions - the more I realise that what we're talking about is a sack. A sack with compartments, a sack with different dimensions to the previous sack, a sack made from different materials, but nevertheless a sack. This particular bag is the Tenba P-750 Pro Pak™ from the early 1980s, with its super-cool logo which reads the same upside down (but best not to verify this when the bag is full of kit). You often see them referred to as the ‘Tenba Equa’ because the logo suggests that is the name. It was available in rust, black, and grey, as well as the more traditional tan colour you see here. It is constructed of ‘Cordura’, a waterproof and rugged nylon. ‘Cordura’ will always win in a friction squabble with your coat or trousers. Tenba put a less aggressive pad of material on later Pro Pak™ bags where the ‘Cordura’ met the owner’s clothing. The P-750 is an unusual design with a fairly deep compartment within the lid to store 30 to 40 rolls of film, and a stout zip fastener to keep the contents secure. On the other side of the top ‘half’- i.e. on the inside of the bag’s main compartment - is a modest zipped compartment which might be for tickets and passport-type documents. There are four ‘D’ rings, for a back-harness or tripod straps, and unusual side straps which can be deployed to limit the travel of the lid or to transport a monopod. The main compartment lacks the extreme weather-proofing measures you find on a Billingham bag, like zips and secondary flaps. That is perhaps a weakness if near water or sand. It rather negates the value of ‘Cordura’ as a waterproof fabric. The coups de foudre are the two external pouches which, in combination with the hip logo, make this bag unusually distinctive in a market place stuffed with boring oblong boxes with straps. Photographed at Avebury stone circle using a Nikon D90 and an AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D lens.