Ever expanding camera bag farm

As requirements and needs change over time one accumulates a variety of camera bags in search of that "perfect" one does it all bag that does not exist!

I dragged them all out, took a photo of the bag family, and cataloged them all (yes weather stinks again,  am bored)

These are the lists of the currently high use bags, and a list of the entire bag family.

Lowepro seems to be the preferred go-to manufacturer for soft bags, in all my decades of use their products have never let me down!
And Pelican (they also make Storm) for hard shell cases.

Am currently thinking of replacing the old LowePro Photo Trekker Classic backpack with a newer design Lowepro Flipside 400 AW backpack.
 
Current in use camera bags and cases
Manufacturer    Product                               Usage
LowePro               Fastpack 200                        (wife's taken it for her kit)
LowePro               Slingshot 300 AW                 (short day hikes)
LowePro               Stealth reporter D400 AW    (events)
LowePro               EX 180                                  (lighting kit)
LowePro               Photo Trekker Classic          (heavy field kit)

Gitzo                    GC3100 Series 3 Tripod Bag  (vehicle tripod tranport)
Pelican                 1520 case                                (vehicle gear transport)

Current stable of camera bags and cases
Manufacturer    Product                               Usage
Lowepro                Orion AW
LowePro                Orion
LowePro                Toploader                              (day trips to big city)
LowePro                Trimtech Odyssey
LowePro                Mini Mag P
LowePro                Orion Trekker II
LowePro                Fastpack 200
LowePro                Slingshot 300 AW
LowePro                Stealth reporter D400 AW
LowePro                EX 180
LowePro               Photo Trekker Classic
LowePro               Film organizer AW
LowePro               D-pods 30                              (point&shoot)
Lowepro               D-Res 20AW                           (camcorder)

Gitzo                    GC3100 Series 3 Tripod Bag

Pelican                 1520 case
pelican                 1300 case                                (kayaking - dslr)
Storm                   3 model 2500                          (kayaking - P&S)
Storm                   keycase                                   (kayaking - car keys)

Sigma                   EX 120-300 case                   (came with lens)
Sigma                   EX 150 macro case               (came with lens)

Tamrac                 Adventure 4                             (won as door prize)


Image of the bag family crammed in front of a fireplace

Went on a short photo trip

Went on a short photo day trip to Algonquin park,
so of course the temperature was a birsk

Too chilly to take out the tripod for any length of time so did some hand-holding of the rather heavy gear, usually not recommended!
Here is one shot of a Gray Jay, taken with a handheld 600mm at f/5.6 @ 1/1000 second using a Canon EOS 5D MKII which held out in the cold a lot better than we did.




Image created using an older non-stabilized Sigma EX 120-300mm f/2.8 lens and a Sigma EX 2x teleconverter.

Lots more photos to follow, once I thaw out!

For tunes listening to David Gilmours Remember that Night blu-ray.

Photo Business Bootcamp

Final week of the 5 week Photo Business Bootcamp is in and done.
Great, informative "stuff" from the folks at Photoshelter.

A return, to an unexpected upgrade

Came back from a nice month of traveling the north shores of Lake Superior from Pancake Bay to Thunder Bay.
More posts and images to come!

To find we most likely had a visit from the lightning deity.
Our main server (and only windows machine) was cooked, 2 large old IDE drives and the ATX power supply were smoked.
As was our 5.1 home theater amp.

Parts to repair the old machine was close to 1/2 of what building a new machine would come to.
So our old amd 64 x2 based server (939)socket, 4Gb ram, with a mix of slow IDE and sata1 drives has been replaced with a
Intel I7 3.4 Ghz 8 thread processor,
8 Gb of memory,
1 sata3 1 terabyte drive
2 sata2 1 terabyte drives
and Radeon HD 6670 with 1Gb of ddr3 memory video.
Waiting to add in a sata3 hot swap bay.
And it has USB 3.0! dang that speeds up transfers to the external backup drives!

Most things recovered clean from the Acronis True Image backups, except the main OS drive, while it recovered it also refused to boot up on the new hardware.
So now there is a clean OS  install of Windows 7 64bit professional too.
That really cleaned things up from years of software installs and removals.


 We also had to replace our old workhorse printer an ancient HP1120c that just kept going and going, since the new machines don't have parallel ports any longer.
Got a little all-in-one (scan,copy,print,fax) wifi Canon printer to replace it.

The home theater amp has also been replaced with a 7.1 channel amp with HDMI switching, cable from the new PC's video card plugs right in and the windows desktop shares seamlessly with the large screen hidef set!
That's a neat new feature for us.

All kinds of Audio and Video cables were removed since now everything is connected with single hdmi cables.

With the change to hdmi or USB and most deviecs having either wifi or bluetooth the former rats-nests of cables are quickly disappearing!

Guess that is another benefit of the unplanned upgrades!

Tonight we are listening to the Train Stories CD by Don Charbonneau which we picked up from the artist when we met him in a shop while visiting Wawa Ontario.

Posted a couple of aurora oldies

Been a long time since the Aurora Borealis (AKA: The Northern Lights) has shown itself way down in the Lake Simcoe region.

So I dug up a couple of old shots to remind myself what they looked like.
(these are from way back May 15 2005. around 03:45am)


phenomenon - Images by Peter Pauer


The sky was quite dark except for the aurora doing its majestic performance, the foreground tree were lit by a largish 1,000,000 candle power  flashlight being passed over them fairly quickly.

The solar cycle should peak next in early 2013, but the sun seems to be a bit off this time and this cycle does not appear to be working up to be as strong as the last one. You can track the solar cycles here:
NOAA / Space Weather Prediction Center

Today's tunes are some very old blues numbers by Hugh Laurie

Social signs and graffiti

Created a  new gallery of social signs and graffiti.

The first batch of graffiti is from a walk down Toronto's graffiti alley, and is currently available for editorial use only.

Enjoy !


social, graffiti - Images by Peter Pauer

Building a new gallery of eco friendy power

Building a new gallery of eco-friendly and renewable power.
First  19 images of wind generation processed and loaded!


eco power generation - Images by Peter Pauer