What's In My Camera Bag?

This title is a little misleading, this post is more like a "All the camera equipment I own" post. There's no way that all of my camera equipment fits into the bag I have, but at the same time, I know I don't have the biggest collection. Everything that I have bought does serve a purpose for me, I try and do my research so I don't drop a ton of money on something I won't use. It's true that digital photography has a higher cost up front (see my post about the differences between film and digital photography), but if I take care of my equipment it will last me years.

My first and most important piece of equipment is my camera! I have the Canon Rebel T3 and I've had it for about six years now! It's a trooper, and as you can see in the photo, there is no lens attached to it. The T3 is a DSLR, which means that this type of camera has removable and interchangeable lenses.

I've got three Canon lenses that are compatible with my camera. Always do your research and check if the lens you want is compatible with your camera! I bought the tallest one and the medium-sized one when I bought the camera body, they were a package deal. The tall one is the Canon Zoom Lens EF 75-300mm 1.4-5.6. The range of the focal length is very large, and the aperture stops are relatively small. I use this lens when I really need to zoom into something far away, like some landscape photography or sports photography.

The medium-sized lens is the Canon EFS 18-55mm. This is your standard kit lens, if you buy any DSLR you will probably start out with one of these. It's very versatile, which means it's good for beginners. It does have its limits though, which led me to buy my third lens.

The smallest lens you see in the photo above is the Canon 50mm 1.8 lens. The 1.8 aperture means that this camera can allow for much greater depth of field. I've been really liking it for food photography, but I'm eager to try it out on portraiture as well. Since it's small and versatile, it has the nickname "the nifty fifty".

This is the other camera I own, it's the Instax Mini 8. This model is discontinued, but this is the ninth version. I bought this camera off my sister because she wasn't using it, and even now I should use it more. I try to keep an extra pack of film around, because there's just something about the aesthetic of these photographs that are like tiny, printed memories.

I have a camera bag I use if I don't need to haul a ton of equipment. It's fairly small, but divides into three sections on the inside so I can fit the body and two lenses if I so choose. I couldn't find a direct link, but if you search "stylish camera bag" on Amazon you should be able to find something similar.

I have two cloth backdrops that I love, one white and one black. I've found these to be super versatile, they're fairly large and the material is good quality. I've gotten some solid images with these, even if I haven't ironed them yet!

This is a pretty strange picture, but it illustrates what this is! This is my reflector, it has a disk on the inside that can be used on its own as a diffuser and then a double-sided sleeve that zips around the disk. One side of the sleeve has a sliver reflective material and a black side that can darken shadows, and the other side that's shown in the picture has a regular white material and then a gold reflective material. It's not that big, maybe about a foot in diameter, but it's just right for my needs right now.

This is my tether cable, I bought it to use in a class this past semester and while we didn't end up using it as much as originally planned, it's good for me to have one. This cable allows me to connect my camera to a computer and have every photo I take be saved to a hard drive instead of the card in the camera. This just saves some time when doing studio photography, so it is good that I know how to do it for the future.

This little guy is something that I have found so helpful! This is a SD card to lightning adapter. One side can plug into iPhones, iPads, or iPods and you can insert a SD card into the other side. This is great for quickly transferring images to my phone if I need to post online, I used this a lot on my trip to Israel last year!

I also own a tripod, a stand for my camera that has a three-legged base, and a monopod, which has the same idea as a tripod but it only has one leg and cannot stand by itself. The monopod just gives some more support if I'm shooting for a long time, you'll see lots of sports photographers with monopods.

And that sums up my most-used camera equipment! I've included links to everything that I could find, but you could absolutely find something similar to all of these items.

Thanks for reading!

xx, Hannah