Camera Bag Nirvana

My search began by typing “camera bags that don’t look like camera bags” into Google.

I quickly learned that the world is a Venn diagram in which the overlap between ‘bags I like’ and ‘camera bags’ is vanishingly small.

Let’s start with bags I like. There’s the Madewell tote, Mansieur Gavriel Lady bag, and my beloved (albeit discontinued) Mulberry Alexa crossbody. These are the purses I’ve been hauling my DSLR around in since I started this blog – my camera clanging dangerously against keys, jostling with lip glosses, and banging into books. I’ve been courting disaster –  just one water bottle malfunction away from camera annihilation.

And then there are camera bags, which tend to be – let’s not mince words – hideous. Carrying around a bulky nylon bag studded with cords, mesh, and buckles just isn’t worth it. So, I went in search of nirvana – a camera bag that was functional, beautiful, and able to fulfill my laundry list of picky-chick criteria:

• Leather, so it will last and be able to pass for a regular bag
• Crossbody, so I can easily access my gear and keep both hands free
• Structured, so lenses and batteries won’t poke out and make the bag look lumpy
• Large, so I’ll have room for miscellaneous non-camera things such as sunglasses and my phone
• Light, so I won’t cripple myself hiking it up Table Mountain in a few weeks
• Affordable, or at least not more expensive than the camera itself (because that would be crazy, right?)

In the end, there was one definitive winner: The Palma, by ONA. Nice, right?

Taken at Books are Magic (post coming soon!)