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Crumpler Mornings and Walkabout Evenings

So, before we all go and forget I’m a Crumpler fan, this was a rather Crumpler morning as I swung up onto my bike, through my 7 Million Dollar Home full of this evening’s kit over my shoulder, and dangled a lightweight Crumpler tote full of essentials (water and food, so, literally essentials for once) off the handlebars and put some pedal action in to catch a ride with Nick (remember kiddies, carpooling is good for everyone, and the environment.)

Which leads us to the evening plans. Whatever idiocy and confused dates Nick mentioned in the last post, tonight is the next photo walkabout. That’ll be going down at 6:45pm at Coxhall Park in Carmel, Indiana. Grab a camera, grab a buddy, share a ride and come up and see us. Spend some time. Take some pictures. Feel free to show up early. Explore. Make mistakes. Take some winners.

So, if you’re reading this in the Indy area, make it out. Come on, make our day.



Size matters? / Daddy’s got a brand-new bag.

I should preface by saying that I love our used department. Given that they’re also the lighting department. And bags. They handle a lot downstairs and I like to chat with them when I’m making my way back from our warehouse.

They are also some mad-hat haters. I for one am pretty thrilled that my e-410 can, with an adapter, mount a manual focus 50 1.8 from the OM system or Nikon or EOS and have an equivalent 100mm 1.8. Mr. Proctor quipped that he could achieve the same result by cropping his images by 50%. My retort was that my cropped sensor still has all its pixels…and he shot back with the higher pixel density = more noise argument. I weakened, fell back on “control your lighting” and was trampled under the powerful tag-team assault of from Rich’s “I like shooting at ISO 3200 and having it look like 1600″ and Scott’s “why don’t you just draw a picture” jab at my fumbling “I’ll fix it in post!”

My Shooting-Fu is yet weak in its reliance on fixing things like white balance, exposure recovery, and cropping in post, and I must yet tremble before the masters who complete mathy-like equations involving focal length, aperture, apples, oranges, and jalapenos while panning their manual focus lenses without even thinking about it. I am currently more concerned about composition and the more squishy notion of a photograph’s “feel” than being technically perfect right from the camera (because, you know, there’s no on-board firmware making decisions about color balance, contrast, etc).

So have fun with the below:

Where my new Crumpler bags were hellishly in need of some white balancing I went back and used the handy one-touch WB function and shot it again. Mostly to keep playing with the new gallery function Mr. Martin has implemented in the blog.

See you Thursday, folks.



Spring Expo 2009: Crumpler

As Mr Henry across the room is enjoying his just-arrived today 6 Million Dollar Home (the Black / Gunmetal / Lime Green variant, for those of you sporting too much curiosity [and which we don't stock but will happily special order for you]), as well as a couple Headaitch totes, I figure now’s probably the right time to break out the shortest and… strangest… Expo interview we did. It’s… no, you know what? Just watch:



Keep on keepin’ on.

Alright boys and girls, step right up, bring yourselves, bring your cameras, bring hot shoe flashes and accessories, bring your friends who wear hot shoes and flashy accessories – we’re doing another Photowalk on Wednesday, April 22nd.

Thanks again to Chris and Tony who came out this week, despite the chill, despite the humidity, despite the overcast, way too evenly diffused lighting.

I ran into a snag, of sorts this week, one which I intend to Crumple next week. The snag? Adding Derek’s Lensbaby 3G to my bag for a few days. Now my handy little Olympus kit bag is bursting with kitted goodness and things are more crowded than a Tokyo subway. Despite my 410′s dinky body, one attached and two floating lenses is more bacon than the pan can handle.

My chosen solution is the Crumpler Six Million Dollar Home. I know you know that D-mart is a Crumpler devotee, and I’m getting convinced myself. They’re heavy duty, water-repellent bags with massive amounts of velcro, fat padding, and are run by guys who will measure the capacity of their bags with six packs. Now if only camera manufacturers would start using jiggers as a metric for bokeh…



Crumpler is Insane, Hilarity Ensues

Crumpler USA

Crumpler USA

Crumpler is nuts. As eye-raising as certain ThinkTank bag names can be (“Whip It Out”, “Streetwalker”), Crumpler doesn’t just stride past them, they apparently do cartwheels and back-handsprings past them while laughing reminiscently of Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker.

Once a year they sell bags for pre-determined amounts of beer. They have color by number toilet paper. They sold me the best bottle opener I’ve ever owned. They have bags with names like “Dreadful Embarrassment”, “Salary Sacrifice”, “Thirsty Al”, and “Cork and Fork.”

And, apparently, they have product descriptions that throw up red flags in our site’s spam detection system.

Yes, yes, this is good . . . I like the view . . . And do you like my sharks in the pool? Yes, hmmm, they don’t seem to like that topless girl . . . Who is she, by the way, dahhhhhling?

With product descriptions like the one above (from the 2 Million Dollar Home) I can’t see why any flags would be thrown up at all. (End sarcasm)

Anyway, it was actually a delightful little mess, and I think we’ve got things tweaked so it won’t happen again. But, if you were trying to search our site for any of our Crumpler stock there for an hour and came up emtpy, well, we thought we owed you an explanation.



2009 Fashions

So, those shiny new Nikon Coolpix digital cameras and Canon PowerShot digital cameras aren’t the only things getting face lifts for the new year, we recently got a bunch of stock on the newly redesigned Crumpler Million Dollar Home series bags.

Crumpler, famous for its off-the-wall attitudes (at their New York store they’ve had annual “buy bags for beer” events before, and you can get collector’s toilet paper from them. No, seriously.), are also known for making bright, stylish bags that don’t skimp on the quality, either.

The Million Dollar Homes are their photographic messenger-style shoulder bags, and range from just big enough for the EOS Rebel with its kit lens to big enough to house my entire personal camera kit, including battery charger.

Crumpler 6 Million Dollar Home

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What’s In a Bag?

ThinkTank Streetwalker (Please, Withhold All Jokes for Later)So, it’s been a while since we’ve hit up a Raw Footage (my camera-man has been busy the past month), but I’m going to try and get a packing exercise done later for the ThinkTank Photo Streetwalker, which is actually a surprisingly trim and still roomy backpack (and of the tried-and-true “strap a camera tripod to the back” variety at that”).

And, while I’m thinking bags, Chuck forwarded me a mail yesterday, in which a reader name of “Greg” said he’d like to know what we over at Roberts shove into our bags. You know, Greg, I think it’s a great idea, although I’m not sure I’ll be able to con anyone else into talking. Might be fun to try and get a shot of Jody’s gear, though…

But, I thought, hey, I may as well talk a bit about the various odd bits and digital camera accessories that’ve sorted themselves into my Crumpler since I shot the footage of me packing it:

1. Olympus digital camera kit. Anyone who reads this blog knows I shoot an Oly kit. E-3, 50-200mm, an old 50mm Zukio f1.8, and a Lensbaby 3G. I’m angling to add a 14-54 to my kit sometime (hey, how about it Oly, you wanna hook me up with an old demo one? Eh? Eh?)

2. A Nikon SB-25, which I found in our venerable Used Department. I use it with a Wein peanut slave as an off-camera key light.

3. Two custom flash modifiers.

4. Two medium plastic spring clamps. And a little 2″ metal c-clamp (hey, you never know, I might need that!)

5. An LED flashlight (never know when you need to shed a little light on the subject).

6. A Roberts card wallet with a selection of mismatched flash memory cards.

7. A Lensbaby creative aperture kit.

8. A Crumpler beer bottle opener (in true Crumpler style, called “The Boozer’s Friend”)

9. An Altec Lansing Orbit portable speaker (for jamming out when shooting models outdoors)



7 Million Dollar Home: Video Review

Alright, in honor of my bag upgrade we’re going to start a specialized segment of Roberts Raw for bag capacities. We’re going to kick it off with my own personal kit (actually, there was some space left so I borrow a few extra products from our display rack to pad it out) and a Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home to show you about what you can expect it to hold. Because, let’s face it, if you’re anything like me you read the interior dimensions of a bag and go “that’s great, now how much is that in equipment?”

You can watch the video below, no frills, just quick bag packing, to see how much equipment this particular bag can swallow. If you want to see a specific ag you’ve been eyeing packed, hit us up in the comments or email me at dmartin@robertsimaging.com. We’ll select two bags a month and pack different types of kits–Canon digital SLR cameras, Nikon flashes, Sony lenses, compact camcorders, you name it–all specifically chosen to give you a good visual estimate of how much you’ll be able to squeeze in.

This particular bag held all this equipment: Olympus E-3, Olympus 50-200mm, Olympus 18-180mm, Olympus 12-60mm, Olympus Zuiko 50mm, Lensbaby 3G, Nikon SB-25, Metz 58 AF-1, Joby Gorillapod SLR-Zoom, Induro SA-0, Roberts card wallet, miscelleneous small bits and accessories.



Waiting for a New Bag

7 Million Dollar Home So, I tok the dive and decided to upgrade my bag. This is a big step in a man’s life, maybe not as important as his first date or his first cup of coffee, but important nonetheless. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of variables have to be carefully weighed and examined before a choice can be made. What equipment do I have? What equipment will I have? How much do I want to carry day-to-day? What style? What color? These days there’s a dizzying, near-infinite combination as answers and a different bag for each (here at Roberts alone we have around 800 different style/color options available).

So, I sat down, and I thought about my “tackle.” An Olympus digital camera, mid-sized. A fairly chunky but not huge telephoto zoom. A standard zoom. A Lensbaby 3G. A very tiny Zuiko prime from the 70s. An aging but still excellent SB-25 (found in the Nikon flashes down in our used store). I’ll be adding a Metz 58 AF-1OP as soon as the funds come up next year. I’ve got a Gorillapod SLR-Zoom with an Induro SA-0 on it (a nice substitute for camera tripods, useful for remote flash work.) A slew of the usual digital camera accessories: an extra battery, some cables, the aperture for the Lensbaby, a spare compact flash memory card or two.

In the future there might be another lens or two, and I might start carrying around a back-up body, so I need a bag with a lot of space and a bit more I can milk out of it.

But I hate those monolithic black ballistic nylon backback bags. Don’t get me wrong, companies like ThinkTank Photo make some very slick offerings in that style. But it’s not for me.

So I have a Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home on its way, in the tasty brown/oatmeal/green (they’ve apparently done away with the brown/green/blue version) color combo. Expect some pictures to come as I attempt to fit everything inside it.




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