Going on a walk and buying camera bags

This morning I went out on a walk with Brian. When we left it was a mixture of cloud and clearer sky, with the cloud blocking the sun. As we drove through the countryside the sun came out, and it was really nice seeing the countryside lit up by the warm winter sun.

When we started the walk the sun had gone in again, although after about 15 or 20 minutes it came out again for about 20 minutes, but then the sky clouded over and it was overcast for the rest of the walk.

On the walk we saw a hunting party hunting pheasants, and they had a pile of about 20 pheasants they'd killed. We also saw a woman with pheasants strapped round round her. We saw lots of alive pheasants as well.

The walk was nice, though would have been a lot nicer if it wasn't overcast. The ground was also very wet and muddy.

When we got back home my Lowepro 65AW camera pouch/bag that I vought off ebay had arrived, so I unpackaged it and tried fitting my D200 + 70-300VR with reversed hood in it. It did fit, but only just. The bag was a bit shorter than I thought it would be, but sticks out quite far from the belt.

As many people have commented about the 75AW bag mounting on the belt too far away from the top of the bag, so the bag pulls away from the belt, I found the same problem with the 65AW.

I've tried attaching it to the belt using 6cm carabiners connecting the carrying strap loops on the bag to the S&F Harness loops on the belt. Not actually used it like this yet, but it felt better like this just trying it on.



Main purpose of this photo is to show how the bag mounts to the S&F Deluxe Waistbelt as when I looked at all the photos of the bag before buying it I couldn't see how it actually mounts to the belt. The mesh section on the back of the bag pulls away from the back of the bag and you can push the belt through there. There is also a piece of velcro under the mesh bit, that sticks to the 'fuzzy' section on the back of the S&F Deluxe belt.

After lunch I copied the pics I took on the walk to my comp, sorted them a bit, tagged them with the lens and filters used and then batch processed the ones that didn't look like they didn't need HDR or stitching into a pano.

After that I had a look at different Lowepro bags I could get to go with my Lowepro Street and Field Deluxe Waistbelt. As the 65AW doen't have much room in it, I wanted to get another bag to hold all my filters, lens blower, sensor cleaning, etc. stuff. Another bag that can carry a camera with lens attached would also be nice, that way I could take my canon and nikon cameras with lenses with me.

After much looking I decided to just order lens cases from Warehouse Express (I had to order by 6pm today to get free delivery). I bought:

Lowepro Lens Case 1	£9.99	For Tokina 10-17mm/3.5-4.5 DX fisheye
Lowepro Lens Case 2S	£13.99	For Canon MP-E 65mm/2.8 or 100mm/2.8 macro lenses
Lowepro Lens Case 1W	£14.99	For Nikon 18-70mm/3.5-4.5G DX with reversed hood or 77mm polariser attached
Lowepro Lens Case 1S	£11.99	For Nikon 50mm/1.4D
Lowepro Lens Case 3	£13.99	For Nikon 70-300mm/3.5-5.6G VR
Free delivery	£.00
Total (inc. VAT)	£64.95

There was a nice looking Lowepro bag on ebay that looked like it might fit on the Street & Field Deluxe Waistbelt, and hold a camera + accessories and/or lenses.

I bid a minute before the auction ended to try and make sure my bid would go through, and it went through almost immediately, but then a few people bid in the last minutes, and in the last few seconds I got outbid. It ended up going for £15.59 + £4P&P, my top bid was £15. Quite a good price when you consider that the much smaller Lowepro bags that just hold a camera and a couple of small accessories cost between £20 and £30.

Because my bids don't go through when I bid near the end of an auction, but if I bid when there's still some time to go I always get outbid, I decided to look for some ebay sniping software as I think most people must be using sniping software to bid within the last few seconds of an auction.

First I found this site called Auction Lotsnipe that says it will snipe auctions for you, for FREE, but you have to give them your ebay login details for them to snipe on your behalf (obviously). I did some googling to check the company was legit and not just stealing ebay login details, there weren't many posts about it, but I did find this yahoo answers page: What's the best Ebay "sniper" software out there?
where a couple of people recommend goofbay.

So then I googled for goofbay, again not many reviews, but I did find a thread on the Money Saving Expert (MSE) forums where someone said they had been using it without problems for quite a while. So I decided to give goofbay a try and signed up there, and put a snipe in for Lowepro Nova 4 bag, which looks quite similar to the bag I got outbid on, except it's green. Would've prefered black, but never mind.

If I win it, I hope it's not too big to attach to the Lowepro S&F Deluxe waistbelt. It would also be good if I could fit the 450D with 100mm macro or MP-E lens attached, and the MT-24EX flash mounted.

I checked my email, and had an email from ecashback saying it had a link to a free £5 voucher for amazon.co.uk. So I clicked on the link, but it just went to the amazon.co.uk site and there wasn't a mention of a £5 voucher anywhere. There was, however, a mention of amazon's January sale. I'm not sure if it's their real january sale, or just one for books and a few other things. I had a look at the art & photography books, just looked through a few pages of them, but they all seemed around normal amazon.co.uk price.

After dinner I watched Lost with Maccy and Ben, then watched a Jan Svankmeier film with Mac. Then I finished checking my email, and I'd been outbid on the green Lowepro Nova 4 bag that I had put a snipe bid in for. So I searched ebay for 'Lowepro' and looked through all the listings to see if there were any other similar bags that looked like they might be good.

Then I tried taking some photos of a succulent plant flowers using the Canon 100mm/2.8 macro, but they didn't come out very well.

Food
Breakfast: Lemon marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: 2x cheese on toasts; bit of white wine; satsuma; honey & muesli flapjack crumbs; slice of chocolate swiss roll; chocolate digestive biscuit bar; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Breaded fish portion; peas; potato; mashed potato; spaghetti in tom sauce; salt; ground black pepper; butter. Pudding was black forest gateaux. Coffee.