With advent of a new lens for Christmas I needed a new camera bag for the purpose of...well, what you normally do with a bag :D I like carrying my stuff in a back pack, so there it was, go for a backpack camera bag and one that will hold plenty of stuff and lenses should I get them in the future - and no doubting about it, I will.

A second thought came into my head, yeah ok I want a backpack to hold my camera gear but what if I needed to take my laptop with me? I'd need two backpacks! Not that I will carry it with me all the time, just if needs be. To the internet I go - a wonderful wealth of information and views on camera bags from people in the know on makes and styles and uses, etc - and so many there was.

I whittled it down to two makes of back and a few different backpacks, but I wanted to see, feel and try them before buying. On the highstreet there aren't many places to go except your local camera stoe of which I only have one here in Sunderland an that is Charles Eagles, who's staff are really helpful in not just service and sales, but unfortunately they had nothing in that really suited what I was looking for - I don't count Jessops as a local store, besides they are pretty unhelpful and have limited stock to look at.

All I could find after a wonder through Newcastle too were Lowepro bags amongst a two other brands, but Lowepro have some real goo sturdy backpacks and I found the perfect one for outdoors, waterproof, it's own little rain coat, fits my laptop and also fits my tripod to it which is a bonus.

The backpack to fill my needs was the Vertex 100 AW and it's fit for a full days Photography and will hold your filters, extra batteries, memory cards, cleaning gear and upto 5 lenses as well as a laptop which I mentioned, pretty darn cool I reckon.

There you go, I'm swayed, if you need a good camera bag Lowepro certainly have some damn good reasons to look at theirs.

Thank you Macheist for giving us these great gifts for Christmas via the Givingtree. A wonderful array of applications and games including Synergy, Enigmo 2 and 1Password amongst others adding up to 8 gifts in all.

Here's wishing you all a very happy Festive period and best wishes for the New Year.

Enjoy and be Merry, don't y'all get too drunk :)

Best Regards

Ian

A Mac user doing Microsoft qualifications you say? Well, yes and aiming high for a new career - bout time I started this blog up again.

So, if you hadn't guessed, I've been gaining myself some further professional education and it's something new to get my teeth sunk into. In an attempt to aid me (which it did) I invested in a high end box of chips and electronics with Windows Vista on it - I find that with all the hoo har going on about it being no good "XP was better" and "it's just copied from Leopard" well I just like it, maybe because of the new learning maybe because of it being something new.

I has opened up my interest in Freeware and Open Source again on the Windows side of the coin, which to be honest I am quite impressed with the quality of - considering I was totally bowled over with the quality and depth of Mac Freeware and branded Windows alternatives as poor in comparison.

Above all of the system maintenance freeware that i put on here (Vista machine) the one that most impressed me (and this may seem daft) is Launchy for the one sole reason of what it is and does, which is act like Quicksiler on my Mac.