My (Repaired) Camera Bag

I have my much loved ThinkTank Mirroless Mover camera bag back in service (with a repaired zip). It is perfect for my little OMD 10 mkiii Olympus mirroless camera plus two extra  lenses. (I also acquired a forth lens along the way which also fitted in easily). It was never overcrowded and very light compared with carrying my older Pentax DSLR and just one lens.

The big bonus for me is I have enough room to carry an A3 sketch book (or two) and also my mini Cotman sketchers palette and a couple of pens and water brushes giving me the ability to sketch anytime I was out with my camera, which was always. Even if I just sat down for a coffee or waiting for a lunch order, I could sketch.

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Hervey Range Tea Rooms :: #sketches in #watercolour (#waterbrush & #cotmansketcherspocketbox) & #pencil

A post shared by Norm Hanson (@normhansonart) on Aug 17, 2019 at 5:00pm PDT

As I was only carrying one camera body I made sure I had my smartphone and the old but reliable pink FujiPix compact camera as backups (not required). Again I can report that I used everything I took (see my Flickr posts)

The small tripod is really small and just ok for my light Olympus, importantly it fits in my suitcase, as does the various chargers and cables on the pink microfiber cloth. I didn’t normally carry them around.

My slimmed down Art Kit

I thought I should recommence semi-regular blogging with a couple of short posts about the creative tools I took on my recent travels. Traveling out of a suitcase does put a big restriction on what you can reasonably include. Further on other trips I have carried items I never used.

This time I wanted everything to fit into the little red Pocket Backpack (it looks like a soft purse but expands out in a simple backpack. I had considered long and hard and decided to take a very sketch oriented set of tools (two palettes of watercolours, inktense blocks and pencils my watercolour brush roll, a roll of sketching pens & pencils and a variety of papers) and a small drawing board (see if you can find it). Whilst travelling on planes this fitted nicely at the base of my case but the rest of the trip was always on hand in the red backpack. I actually had a small extra sketch kit in my camera bag but that can wait till the next post.

I can report back that I used  all of it as some time and because everything as always at hand I used it often. You can see some of my work over at @normhansonart on instagram.