Oh, I’ve been meaning to post to this thread for a while, thanks @lizardbreath for resurrecting it.
I have three ‘active’ kits right now. This is my digital kit:
Body is a Nikon D7000, purchased right at discontinuance for the lowest price I’ve seen for it. Lens are a AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR, which is only detached from the body for this portrait, and a AF-S DX Micro-NIKKOR 40mm f/2.8G, which I bought mainly for slide copying. Both lenses are refurbs.
The bag is a Travelon Anti-Theft Urban Messenger bag, not a camera bag per se, but my essential kit fits in it. Wife bought this and the camera strap for a recent vacation, both have steel cables embedded to thwart cut-n-run snatching.
The small mesh bag contains batteries and SD cards, and is what I grab for pick-up snapshooting. Next to it is a ColorChecker Passport, which I’m endeavoring to incorporate in my shooting workflow.
The tripod is my first really serious gear acquisition, Manfrotto MT055XPRO3 Aluminum 3 Section with a Manfrotto 327RC2 pistol grip ball head. I’m too-optimistic a hand-held shooter, and my tripod collection to date is decidedly flimsy (well, one exception, will discuss it in a bit), and these two pieces are decidedly Beefy. Not really travel equipment, but they ain’t moving when I need still…
Here’s my old film kit:
Nikon F2 Photomic, procured in 1974, my second “real” camera, after a Minolta SRT-102 that served yeoman’s duty in high school, shooting for the yearbook and a bit for the paper. Lenses are, left-to-right, Nikkor 28mm f3.5, which ended up being my main lens, 50mm f1.4 NIKKOR-S Auto, which came with the camera, and 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor-P-C telephoto. Also pictured are the detachable flash shoe and a non-working Vivitar flash. The bag is a US military surplus small field pack, the precursor to the “fanny pack”. I actually keep this kit in a more modern Nikon bag, but that was only as of last year - for the previous 40 years, this kit resided in the green bag.
Edit: Oh, the filters. Particularly, the orange one on the left. That makes clouds pop from blue sky in monochrome. Friend of mine back in the '70s kept a red filter ‘glued’ to his Pentax for this purpose…
I plan to shoot some black-and-white with this kit, mainly to thwart the frustration we’ll encounter with this kit:
A “baby” Graphlex, 2"x3" film format. Above it are a 120 roll film back and an eyepiece for focusing on the ground glass. The bag is an LLBean nylon satchel that I just had lying around. The tripod is an old Star-D or some sort, originally procured along with a couple of view cameras.
The story behind this kit is this: Some years ago, I procured a couple of view cameras, a 4"x5" Speed Graphic and a 1903 Eastman No. 2 8"x10" (mahogany and leather, beautiful piece of furniture…) with the intent to exercise a dream from my youth of doing large format landscapes. That went nowhere, and I eventually sold both to a friend in Northern New Mexico who was resurrecting old equipment for similar uses. Later, in a railroad bulletin board he maintains I posted a few sentences about how my granddaugher Elizabeth was developing an interest in photography. All on his own, my friend boxed up this kit and mailed it to us, along with a developing tank and 5 rolls of film.
This camera is a challenge. Through-the-lens focusing is done by mounting a ground glass plate in place of the film pack and looking at the inverted image while racking the lens board back and forth. If that’s too onerous, the camera has a separate rangefinder, which I have yet to figure out. There are two shutters, one built into the lens, the other in the camera next to the film plane. I don’t want to frustrate the grandkid too much, so we’ll try a few exposures with the Graphlex, but we’ll also load and shoot with the Nikon…
These kit pictures were shot with our old Nikon D50 with 18-200mm zoom. We bought it to take pictures of kids, cheaper cameras would take their good time from button-press to shutter-open, so we got a lot of pictures of our floors. This is the camera that drug me out of my photography hiatus, kicking and screaming into the world of digital. It sits under our living room couch now, available for short-notice family snapshooting, and kit photography…
More prose than picture, sorry for the long-winded treatise. But, there’s a story behind every bag…