Tom Bihn Bags for Micro Four Thirds Cameras

Tom Bihn Side Effect and Camera Lenses

Choosing a good camera bag is hard. It’s a very personal endeavor on two levels: style and functionality. How people use their cameras and what they decide to carry differ significantly for different people.

When I decided to step up my photography game earlier this year, I decided to go with a Micro Four Thirds system — specifically, the Olympus OM-D E-M5 — rather than a DSLR. The reason largely boiled down to size and quality. There are awesome lenses available for Micro Four Thirds, and the equipment as a whole is significantly smaller and lighter than the equivalent DSLR camera and lenses. When I see my  friends lugging around giant packs of equipment, I just shake my head. In this day and age, it’s just not necessary.

Once I had acquired my new equipment, I needed to figure out how I was going to carry it all around. Specifically, I wanted something:

  • Small. What’s the point otherwise of smaller equipment?
  • Ergonomic. Again, what’s the point of small and light if your bag is not designed to feel comfortable?
  • High quality. My equipment is expensive. I didn’t need to be putting at risk in a cheap bag.
  • Accessible. Compact isn’t helpful if you have to dig around to get your equipment.
  • Stylish. I’m not exactly a fashionista, but I like things that look good.
  • Flexible. I didn’t necessarily need a single system to work for all occasions. If it made sense to have different bags for different occasions, I was willing to do that… within reason. I didn’t want to have a bunch of unitasking bags floating around either.

Given the flexibility requirement, the first question I asked was, “How can I use my carry this equipment in my existing bags?”

I’m brand loyal to very few companies, but one of them is Tom Bihn, a Seattle-based company that makes beautiful, functional bags. I bought my first Tom Bihn bag in 2008, and I have consistently bought new bags (for different purposes — these things are designed to last forever) approximately every two years. I also have a boatload of accessories. They are not cheap, but they are high-quality, they look great, and they are superbly functional. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

I first bought a Brain Bag as a travel backpack that could hold a whole bunch of stuff efficiently and ergonomically. That bag was so comfortable, I replaced my messenger bag with it and started using it as my every day work bag. However, there were certain situations — walking around the city for the day, for example — when a big bag was overkill, and all I needed was something that would carry my water bottle, a pocket camera, and a book. I eventually bought a Medium Cafe Bag to fulfill that role.

This past year, I bought a Synapse 19, which has become my primary day and work bag. There is a larger version of the Synapse (the Synapse 25), but the smaller one is more comfortable, it fits quite a bit for its size, and it forces you to be smart about what you carry. I realized that most of the stuff I had been carrying around in my Brain Bag were “just in case” items. I was better off focusing on what I actually needed. It’s a shift in my philosophy about bags, one that colored my choice in photography bags.

So the first question was, could I carry my equipment around in my existing bags? The second question was, did I need to get another bag to fulfill different needs? The answer to both questions was yes.

Tom Bihn makes a camera insert for the Brain Bag called the Camera I-O. However, it’s designed for a DSLR system and was overkill for my camera. It also only fits in the Brain Bag. I wanted something that worked with my smaller bags.

I ended up buying this $20 insert from Amazon.com. It’s holds my camera and two additional lenses easily, and it fits perfectly into my Medium Cafe Bag, as you can see from the video below:

It fits easily into my Brain Bag, of course, but it’s a tight fit in my Synapse, and I can’t fit my laptop sleeve at the same time. My Synapse is good for carrying additional gear — lenses in lens pouches or the Side Effect (as described below), a flash, etc. — but it really doesn’t work well as a camera bag. And frankly, I don’t want to be using a backpack as a camera bag. It’s too hard to get my gear in and out.

The Medium Cafe Bag with insert works fine for most cases, but it’s not big or functional enough to carry additional gear. It’s also not functional enough for volume shooting — for example, if I’m shooting an event. In the latter case, I don’t want my camera in a bag. I use a BlackRapid Metro shoulder strap to hold my camera, but I needed something to hold my lenses. The Medium Cafe Bag or any other camera bag would have been overkill.

As it turned out, Tom Bihn had a great solution: the Side Effect, which can be used as a waist pack or a tiny shoulder pack. It can easily hold three lenses or two in heavily padded pouches. It can also fit in the bottom pocket of my Synapse 19, which gives me a modular, padded system for carrying my lenses in my backpack.

I wear the Side Effect with my lenses around my waist, as I describe in the video below. The original Side Effect had built-in, tuckaway waist straps, but it seems that most customers didn’t want that, so they replaced them with removable waist straps. I’m probably the only person in the world who wishes that they had kept the old waist straps, but it’s not a big deal. This system works fine.

The above bag combinations covers a good percentage of my needs. However, there are times when I don’t want to be carrying my camera on my shoulder (if I’m walking through a sketchy neighborhood, for example), I still want to have easy access to my camera (meaning a shoulder bag rather than a backup), and I need to carry more than my Medium Cafe Bag can easily accommodate (a flash, for example).

I thought about getting a Co-Pilot to fulfill this need, but the lack of built-in padding and my concerns about how efficient the space would be for this specific needs were deterrents. I decided I wanted a dedicated shoulder camera bag for this, and unfortunately, Tom Bihn does not make one. (Please consider it!)

I investigated a ton of camera-specific brands, and I ended up getting a Billingham-Hadley Small. These are gorgeous, high-quality bags, and it turned out to be the most functional as well as the perfect size. My only gripe is that it does not have a handle on the top (larger versions of the bag do). It’s perfect for keeping what I need most accessible, and if I need to carry additional items “just in case,” I wear my Synapse 19 as well.

I ended up choosing expensive bags, but it’s all well worth it in my opinion. Often, people buy cheaper bags, find that they don’t quite work, and then buy additional bags. It ends up adding up, both in expense and also in space and mindshare. Better to pay the money up-front for the right bag. If you do your research and especially if you’re willing to buy used, you can also find some good deals on the above bags.

I also can’t help reiterating how awesome the form factor of these systems are. I can carry quite a bit of equipment around very discreetly, and I don’t feel the effects of the weight, even if I’m on my feet all day.

I invested a ton of time into thinking about how I wanted to use my equipment and finding the bags that fit my needs, but it was worth it, and I hope others find the fruit of my research useful as well.

Photography Is About the Person Behind the Camera

I loved this 500px interview with Gabriele Liaudanskaite, a 17-year old Lithuanian food photographer. She only uses natural light, she mostly shoots in automatic mode, and she uses a cheap kit lens. And, her photos are gorgeous. Further proof that photography is ultimately about the person behind the camera, not the tool itself.

She also offered some excellent advice for beginning photographers on developing their voice:

One should not be afraid to begin with ordinary pictures: blooming tulips in grandma’s yard, oh-my-god-how-awesome clouds at sunset, touristic pictures of famous landmarks from a very boring angle, close-ups of friend’s new puppy or kitty or whatever. Only after taking such photos one will start to feel the need to become different.

Never Compromise

I’ve been an Aaron Huey fanboy since seeing his amazing photography of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at Pop-Up Magazine a few years back. He’s the only person I follow on Instagram whom I don’t actually know in real life.

Yesterday, he posted a photo from his latest assignment. Because he’s a National Geographic photographer, he has a huge following (more than 40,000 followers) on Instagram, and his pictures get a ton of comments, most of which I ignore. However, one comment from this picture stood out to me, largely due to its boldness. It was from Andrew Griswold, who himself has a huge Instagram following. Andrew wrote:

Hey Aaron, huge fan of your work. My wife were just talking about this last night and I was curious how exactly do you become a photographer for @natgeo? As it being the holy grail of jobs for me I was just curious how your path brought you there. Would love to connect! Hit me up anytime.

I loved Aaron’s response:

Secret is to never compromise (no plan B) and you’ll likely need to shoot one thing deeper/better than its ever been shot before. Forget single images. Shoot a story.

Great advice for aspiring artists of all ilks, including social artists.

Social Artistry

Last week, my friend, Elissa Perry, a poet and a leadership consultant, asked me how my recent foray into “creative processes” was affecting how I thought about my work. She was referring specifically to my photography dabblings, but I was confused at first. I didn’t understand her distinction between “creative processes” and “my work,” because I always thought those two things were one and the same.

Both my sisters are “artists” in the more traditional sense. My older sister is a violinist married to a composer. My younger sister got her MFA in creative writing, although she is now a practicing lawyer. While their mediums of choice are different from mine, I don’t see my work as being substantially different from theirs.

I was in the business of designing experiences that facilitated high-performance collaboration. I used the same creative muscles that my sisters did to do their work, and I got to express myself in the process. My work stimulated me intellectually from solving a problem and emotionally from being creative. Like all art, the process of creation was sometimes a frustrating grind, but it was overall a wonderful, joyful experience. I’m feeling it right now as I design the next iteration of Changemaker Bootcamp.

A few years ago, I came across the term, “social artist,” from Nancy White to describe this kind of work. I haven’t quite adopted it for myself, but I think it’s an apt description.

As for Elissa’s original question, here are some recent musings about how my photography has affected my other creative processes:

And this is a great excuse to share some of Elissa’s artistry. At last week’s wonderful Creating Space X conference, the notions of “bridging” came up several times, so Elissa treated us to a poem that she wrote that was inspired by the new Bay Bridge. It’s part of a collection entitled, “Everything Indicates.”

Beginner’s Mind and the Pace of Learning

Earlier this week, I was watching videos of some of Groupaya’s strategy meetings last year. I was looking for video clips of interesting group dynamics that I could share at Changemaker Bootcamp, but I found myself instead reliving some challenging moments from last year.

Rebecca had set the tone of that meeting by having us celebrate our highlights. This was a good thing, because I spent most of the rest of the meeting talking about what I thought we were doing wrong.

In the midst of my meeting-long, blistering critique, I emerged from my agitation to express a momentary, but authentic feeling of self-compassion and perspective. I said, “I’m not actually unhappy about where we are right now. I think we’ve accomplished some amazing things. I just have to keep reminding myself that this is marathon, not a sprint. If we have to adjust some of our expectations accordingly, then let’s do it.”

Kristin let out a visceral sigh in reaction to this, so much so that I was taken aback at first. “Thank you for saying that,” she said when I looked at her questioningly. “That is so true.”

As it turns out, she had been carrying the same weight that I had, already heavy from her own expectations and exacerbated by what I was adding. “When you run a marathon, you take water from the water station, and you take a moment to replenish yourself,” she said. “You can’t finish otherwise. When you sprint, you don’t have time for that, but you don’t need it either.”

Starting Groupaya made me a much better consultant, largely because of moments like these. It’s easy to say stuff like this to others, but it’s incredibly hard to do in practice. When you are a doer who feels urgency — self-imposed or otherwise — you pressure yourself to go, go, go. Sometimes it’s merited, often it’s not. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to maintain a sense of perspective, to manage your expectations accordingly, to push yourself without killing yourself, and to take the moments you need to replenish.

Now, I find myself at an interesting confluence where I’m needing to take these lessons to heart and where I’m relearning them all over again.

My one leftover project from Groupaya has been helping the Hawaii Community Foundation with a culture change process. I often complain about how foundations don’t move fast enough, and so I find myself in an unusual position of constantly reminding the great folks there to slow down. It’s been a new challenge for me to think about designing water stations as part of my process, giving my client a chance to replenish while reminding them that there’s 20 miles still to go.

Similarly, Changemaker Bootcamp has been a revelation for me. It’s really helped me understand what I know that is valuable, and what I’d like to help others learn. Figuring out how to stage that has been a huge challenge.

What’s unexpectedly helped me throughout all of this has been my photography class. Our teacher, Lauren Crew, runs a very loose class, focusing on immersion and discussion. I love to learn this way. It plays to a lot of my strengths, but it can easily get overwhelming. Every assignment feels like a huge stretch, and you become viscerally aware of what you don’t know and what you can’t do.

Despite everything I know about learning and pacing, despite the confidence I have in my ability to learn, and despite the joy I get from being immersed in a learning process, I have felt a lot of doubt and self-consciousness throughout this whole process (and it’s only been two weeks). What the heck?! I’m a beginner taking an extension school class with a bunch of other incredibly nice beginners with a great, supportive teacher. Why am I getting frustrated at not taking Pulitzer Prize-caliber photos every time I click on the shutter?

Our assignment this past week was about fear. Lauren has encouraged us to start each assignment by being literal, but because of my outsized expectations, I’ve had a lot of difficulty doing that. It’s required a lot of discipline to stop conceptualizing and to start shooting, to recognize that being iterative will work much better than obsessing about perfection on the first try.

I wanted to capture my fear of being placed in a box, of being artificially labelled and constrained. (This explains a lot about my career choices.) A visual that came to mind was the fountain in front of the Embarcadero Center, which consists of lots of boxy tunnels contorting in all sorts of directions. I had wanted to recruit a friend to be a model, but my limited schedule was going to make that very difficult. Besides, it made more sense for me to be in the picture, since this was about my fear, so I decided to do a self-portrait.

I shot for about 20 minutes, and I felt anxious the entire time. I had wanted to come on a foggy morning, but the best opportunity I had was in the middle of the afternoon when the light can be challenging. There were waterfalls everywhere, which limited where I could place my GorillaPod and compose my shot.

The absolute worst part of that whole experience was being my own model. I wasn’t just posing for a cheesy headshot. I was contorting my body in ways that are not flattering, and I was doing it repeatedly, since I had to check the shot and set it up anew each time. To make matters worse, there were several people there taking photos of the fountain, and it seemed like every one of them stopped what they were doing to stare at me.

I’ve been intentionally learning in public, posting my photos on Flickr for all to see. I got a shot that was fine for classroom purposes, but I felt incredibly self-conscious about sharing this particular one publicly, something that hasn’t generally been an issue for me. Part of it was that I didn’t feel like I had successfully executed my vision, but the bigger part was simply not like to see myself in this picture.

Still, I forced myself to push through the discomfort and share. On Facebook, my friends (as usual) expressed support, but my friend, Justin, also asked me to go into more detail about what I was unhappy about. In response to my critique, he decided to play with the image on his own to see if he could get it closer to my original vision.

My original picture is on the left, Justin’s version is on the right. You can see how he manipulated the photo to create a much greater sense of being boxed in while also drawing out the details in my face. He also shared the exact Lightroom settings he used, so that I could replicate his changes and build on them.

Despite all my anxiety, here’s what I loved about this whole ordeal:

  • I loved the feeling of making progress, to know that I’m getting better. To even be at the point where I have a vision for a photograph is huge progress. Furthermore, I understood how to manipulate my camera in ways that I didn’t even a few months ago.
  • I loved the feeling of challenging myself, of living in my discomfort. This process of stretching myself and of being uncomfortable is what’s going to make me better.
  • I loved how learning in public brought much needed support, but more importantly, new insights and a better product. Ward Cunningham often describes the essence of wikis as putting something out there and coming back to it later and discovering that someone has made it better. This experience is not just limited to wikis, and if you’ve ever experienced this firsthand, you know how wonderful and addictive it is.

Learning can be a joyful process, but it can also be a brutal one. My photography class has reminded me of both of these things, and it’s made me much more conscious about how better to support learning, both for others and for myself.

Photo (top) by Dominik Golenia. CC BY-ND 2.0.