Author Archives: And I'm an Elf

The Kata 3N1-33 Bag review

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Kata 3N1-33.jpg

My main travel bag is the Kata 3N1-33 bag. This bag can be worn as a traditional backpack, or by hiding one of the straps and extending the other as a sling bag. This allows for a lot of flexibility when carrying. Both casual walking with easy access to the camera gear as well as steady use as a back bag in hiking situations are possible The bag also has a waist strap for superior comfort when used as a backpack.

The backpack configuration is useful when your main purpose is to actually transport your gear, such as when getting to or from your destination, or on long hikes. Here comfort of carrying your stuff is more important than real access to your gear. Note that you can use either the left or the right strap as you sling strap, making this bag useful for both left and right-handed people alike.

The bag is split into three main compartments: a top compartment for accessories and personal items and the lower part which fits your main camera gear. Finally there is the laptop sleeve at the back that easily fits a 15 inch laptop, in my case a 15 inch MacBook Pro. Also included is a memory card pouch with a velcro back, allowing to securely attach the pouch to one of the velcro strips inside the bag and a separate rain cover which is located in one of the two small side compartments.

As I use this bag for my main travel, as it can take just about everything I would want to take along on a longer travel. For me this includes my main camera body, a Canon 5D Mk II, and three to four lenses, a flash, polarizing filters, batteries, a charger, cables, memory card reader and cleaning items…

In addition I can take my laptop with charger and an external disk, which easily fits into the laptop compartment.

Two accessories are worth mentioning: the tripod holder which allows to attach a tripod or monopod to the bag. I think this is a must have accessory I would recommend getting it with the bag.

A second accessory is a trolley which can be inserted at the back. This converts the bag into a trolley bag if you do not want to carry the bag. All straps can be hidden, and the do not get in the way or dirty when rolling the bag. It works nicely and I can recommend it if you are using the bag as a transport bag and have it loaded to the max.

I do not use the trolley that often, since I want to make the bag appear to be light and cabin luggage compatible. Putting the bag on a trolley, I think, makes the bag look heavier and probably suspicious to check in agents wanting to weigh the bag. I routinely go over weight with the bag, but since it looks very compact I hardly ever get questions on the weight.

My main complaint I have with this bag is that it is too wide. It is not so much a complaint as the problem is not Kata’s fault, but it is a result of  the bag holding a 15 inch laptop and has to be wide enough to hold a computer. The laptop sleeve also adds some 2 to 3 inch of thickness to the bag.

All of this is avoidable, if you use one of the smaller cousins of the 3N1-33 bag, which either include sleeves for smaller laptops, or no laptop sleeve at all.

All in all this is a great bag, well designed and built to high quality standards. It is comfortable as a backpack, can easily be converted to a sling bag and it you have packed it so much you cannot carry it anymore you can use the trolley accessory to pull it along.

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In 80 days around the world

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Great video from Trey Ratcliff from Stuck in Customs documenting his trip around the world in 80 days with 8000 photos in 6 minutes and 14 seconds.

Abusing HTTP Status Codes to Expose Private Information | Mike Cardwell, Online

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This is pretty amazing. With a few lines of JavaScript it is possible to test if you are logged on at a number of popular web sites, such as Facebook, Gmail and Twitter. It works by requesting certain pages on these sites and analysing the http return codes. The requested pages are accessible or inaccessible depending whether a user is logged on or not. They thus give different status codes depending on their accessibility. Pretty cleverand pretty scary!

Abusing HTTP Status Codes to Expose Private Information | Mike Cardwell, Online: “”

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Camera Bags

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Like many photographers I have a certain addiction when it comes to camera bags. After a lot of experimentation I have settled on a small number of camera bags which I frequently use. They include:

Kata 3N1-33
Lowepro Fastpack 200
Lowepro Exchange

Each of these bags have their different use case and I use them in different situations.

In addition to these three main bags I have of course a number of other bags which I rarely use as bags, that is to actually take them out and use them for transporting gear, but mainly for storage. The include some bags from Crumpler and Lowepro, as well as from Tamrac.

In a future blog I’ll review each one of them, explain which bag I use for which occasion an what gear I put in, as well as the likes and the dislikes of the different bags.

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The Top Five Best Books on Photography Composition | Photography 24/7

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Thomas from Photography 24/7 has published a list of “The Top Five Best Books on Photography Composition”. I have read two of them (‘The Photographer’s Eye’ by Michael Freeman and ‘Learning To See Creatively’ by Bryan Peterson) and I agree fully, they are fantastic. Makes me want to immediately go to Amazon to buy the other three.

Nifty Fifty: The Benefits of a Fixed 50 mm Lens

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It has been often said, that one way to improve your photography is to restrict yourself gear-wise and to overcome this limitation creatively. A very popular example of restricting yourself to improve is to stick to one particular lens, in particular to a fixed focus length. A good choice, in particular on a full frame camera is to use a 50 mm fixed focus length lens. A nifty fifty has several advantages:

  • There are inexpensive fast F/1.8 versions of this lens available for both Nikon and Canon (and probably also for other brands).
  • On a full frame camera the field of view is like that of the naked eye. This allows you see through the view finder with one eye and keep the other eye open to had have a similar view which is neither enlarged, as with a telephoto lens, nor decrease, as with a wide-angle lens.
  • Of course the sharpness of these lenses are superb and unbeatable for the price.
  • Being fast lenses, it is an excellent way to practice shallow depth of field.

A nice intro on more benefits can be found on the Phototuts+ blog: A first article (Nifty Fifty: The Benefits of a Fixed 50mm Lens | Phototuts+) explains the benefits of a 50 mm lens, whereas a second article (80 Awe-Inspiring Photographs Taken With a “Nifty Fifty”) has a beautiful gallery of examples of using the nifty fifty.

Black and White film effects | The Woodwork

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Aperture 3 presets are becoming available now. One set of presets I came across is from The Woodwork blog. It tries to emulate the film effects found in Nik’s Software excellent Black and White film effects | The Woodwork.

LensRentals.com – “This lens is soft” and other myths

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The blog — actually it more a newsletter — at LensRentals has a beautiful entry (“This lens is soft” and other myths), which debunks the myth often found on photography forums that people have to go through numerous copies before they find the perfect lens. So why is there so much complaining on soft/or front-focusing lenses? The key to the puzzle is the definition of ‘fine’. Most people assume that ‘fine’ means ‘perfectly calibrated’. In reality cameras are like any other manufactured item, calibration is within a given tolerance range. This leads to people choosing lenses and bodies which match in the same direction of production tolerance:The bad thing is many, many people who did this then hopped on their online camera forum and made blanket statements like “I had to try 3 copies before I found one that was calibrated right”. In reality what they should have said was “I had to try 3 copies before I found one that was calibrated right FOR MY CAMERA”. Those other two copies might well have been fine on someone else’s camera.

The solution to the problem is not to switch copies of lenses, but to use the “lens microcallibration” feature. Unfortunately, this feature of course only exists on more professional type bodies. I have it on my Canon 5D Mark II, but not on my Canon 400D.

Still it allows to understand — from someone with access to a lot of lenses — to explain the discrepancy between the number of complaints and the observation from a rental company finding only a few % of bad lenses.

What is (not) a GTD context?

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As someone trying to apply the Getting Things Done methodology, it is often quite difficult to define good and useful contexts. In particular if the standard ones like @office do not work. Thankfully Evomend has some help available on how to define good contexts:
What is (not) a GTD context?. Even more important it also covers bad choices of contexts to avoid.

10 (more) Ways to Become a Better Photographer « Photofocus

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These 10 tips from Scott Bourne are are probably all valid (maybe with the exception of  tip #9, which I cannot judge because I have not read the book). In particular, tips #1 (Shoot with a project or goal in mind), #3 (Make at least one photograph every single day) and #7 (Edit your work) appear to be the most important to me.