In your bag 884, Dan Barlow
Dan has a cool bag and a cool story on how he returned to film. Come and check it out.

Hi, I’m Dan Barlow, owner of Dan Barlow Photography.

For most of my adult life I have been shooting digital which culminated in me starting my own wedding photography business a few years ago. This opened up all sorts of avenues for shooting in challenging scenarios with some fantastic DSLR equipment to make images which I knew my clients would treasure. However, each time I wanted to take photographs for myself, I was faced with the problem of taking out equipment which was my livelihood or just resorting to iPhone images. More often than not, I left the DSLR bag at home and got throwaway images.

I recovered my Praktica MTL-5 from my Dad’s and decided it was time to shoot some film again. I could focus on what mattered with total mastery over the exposure and best of all, I wasn’t spending hours on Lightroom after a day out editing hundreds of images which I rarely printed.
Last year, I shot a wedding for a couple called Becky and Juan. They received their images and shortly afterwards, I received this Canon F-1 and 50 1.4 SSC as a gift from them for my services! This is now my main camera and I’ve built up a set of breechlock lenses (28mm f/2.8, 85mm f/1.8 and 135mm f/2.5) which can cover most situations, this pretty much mirrors the focal lengths of EOS primes I use to shoot a wedding. Despite them sometimes being a pain to mount, I’ve tried to stick with breechlock so they all match and keeps it all consistent and period. I love the feel of these lenses when focussing – even the beat-up 28mm is a joy to use, they make L series focus rings feel like toys.
Being a big fan of Black Rapid straps for work, one had to go on the weighty F-1, it takes the weight right off and puts the camera out of sight and right where you need it. I mainly carry C-41 film, Superia 200 for snapshots and Pro 400H or Portra 160/400/800 for more serious work; I don’t do much landscape but there’s Ektar or Velvia for that.

I like to take photos around my adoptive city of Manchester and I usually end up somewhere fairly insalubrious so the bag had to be compact and not look too much like a camera bag, this Lowepro one fit the bill and is a perfect fit for the smaller-than-EOS size of the lenses. It also holds business cards so people can contact me, post-its and pencils to jot stuff down/sketch things out on, spare zinc-air batteries and a coin to remove the battery cover, a compact lenspen, Hanimex-Sekonic meter and maps/travel cards for any adventures I’m going on – this was taken after a trip to London to shoot the city and to attend a wedding (as a guest for once!)

Dan

Linky:
www.danbarlowphotography.co.uk
@D_Barlow_Photo
www.facebook.com/danbarlowphoto

Thanks for sharing your bag with us Dan, very cool. Nice gift too.
Check out the links and make sure you come and comment

Keep them coming folks, we need more submissions, so get your bag on Japancamerahunter.com. Send me a hi resolution image of the bag (please make sure it is horizontal) and its contents, with some details about yourself and what you shoot. Oh and don’t forget your contact details (twitter, flickr, tumbler et al). Send the bag shots here. Please understand that there is a long wait now as there is a backlog of submissions. Not all make the cut, so make sure yours is funny/interesting/quirky. And please make sure the shot is of good quality, as the ones that are not do not go up.

Cheers
Japancamerahunter