I own a lot of camera bags.

There is a good reason for this. None of them are right. They are all too large, too small, too obviously a camera bag, whatever. What I’m looking for at the moment is a shooting bag that can hold

• D200 + 17-50mm lens attached
• Sigma 50-150mm
• Sigma 10-20mm / SB-600 flash
• Bits and pieces (wallet, phone, CF cards etc)

…while being as small and as unobtrusive as possible. It really shouldn’t be too hard, right?  Well, there are options, two of which I managed to find at my local branch of Jacobs.

Jacobs is always my first choice of the camera shops in the area. They have a lot of stuff in stock, including loads of odd accessories and the staff know what they’re talking about. This, of course, is rare in retail.

They had a couple of possible choices  – the Lowepro Stealth Reporter D200 and the Crumpler Messenger Boy. Both just under £70.

Crumpler Messenger Boy

I liked the Messenger Boy, but it had one main drawback – too much padding. It’s a good size for my requirements and had the usual quality feel, but because of the excessive padding the bag was too stiff and stuck out from my hip, making it feel and look a lot bigger than it actually is.

A shame really as it’s roomy for its size and the access excellent. Opening the top flap give full access to everything inside. It is a little shallow though and, when wide open, it felt as though the taller lenses could fall out. I don’t think this is necessarily true, but it felt that way.

Also, aside from a full length pocket on the front there aren’t any other pockets, which can be a bit of a pain when you’re trying to seperate accessories.

A nice bag, but it didn’t feel like I was getting good value for money really (of course that’s never stopped me buying Crumpler in the past).

Lowepro Stealth Reporter D200

A very different bag to the Crumpler. But probably a better one.

The guy in Jacobs referred to it as ‘technical’ which is a pretty good description. Tough, lots of pockets, lots of clever little things like a waterproof cover and a reinforced card wallet.

Admittedly, it’s not as pretty – it looks a lot more like a camera bag. But it’s also smaller and molds better to your hip making it less obtrusive. It also holds more, with the drawback that, despite the access in the top, it’s harder to get stuff out quickly. The number of pockets is bordering on silly. I’m not even sure I could find them all.

Neither bag is perfect but the Lowepro seemed to fit my requirements more closely, despite its appearance and slightly odd shape. Despite this, I walked away from the shop empty-handed as I couldn’t quite pull the trigger on the purchase at £70. However, a quick check on Amazon showed that it was available on there for only £55 so I snapped it up (although I felt bad for Jacobs).

I’ll post an unboxing when it arrives and a more comprehensive review.

They now seem to have reduced their lower-end price point to only £3 so I managed to get Nebraska (Bruce Springsteen), Kitty Jay (Seth Lakeman) and Sign ‘o’ the Times (Prince) for only £9. Really good, notable albums all. The days of music costing money (or serious money anyway) seem firmly to be over. In Fopp today you could buy pretty much the whole Pearl Jam, or Rage Against the Machine or hell, Tori Amos back catalogue for about £25 each.

Between the cheapness of CDs, services like Spotify (which delivers streamed music, on demand, for free) and other forms of downloading it’s all there, all the time.

I’m undecided if this is a good thing or not. The magpie part of me revels in the sheer quantity of material that is available, but at times it feels like I’m just drowning in content (8964 songs in iTunes so far).

I’ve been working my way through my CD collection and getting rid of the jewel cases as a prelude to moving house. And what have I discovered? That the CDs I like best are those I bought before 2002, when I bought them one at a time and actually listened to them all the way through, sometimes many times.

When I became able to buy as many as I wanted (and the availablity of music online increased) my listening became an awful lot wider but far more superficial. Now I have about 600 albums but some I’ve only listened to once.