Add to that the battery chargers, AC/DC conversion kit, lots of mini DVDs and 35MM film, manuals, a ton of AA batteries, the boom mike for the HandyCam and a flash and a zoom lens for the Minolta and I had myself a big lump of fragile photographic equipment to haul around. I reluctantly left the tripod at home. See, there is a limit.

I bought myself a new camera bag. I spent hours looking at bags and decided on the LowePro Rover. At an MSRP of $165 it’s not cheap, but it has features that the serious photographer with a lot of equipment should consider. I bought my bag at Ritz Camera at IH-10 and Callaghan, but it is also available online at eBags, or through Amazon for $115.

This is a serious piece of equipment, made for rugged outdoor use. You could climb Mount Everest with this pack. It’s made of 600 denier TXP rip-stop nylon combined with 2,000 denier ballistic nylon. I do believe it could stop a bullet.

It has two main compartments. The lower compartment is padded and divided with adjustable, padded inserts for camera gear. All my cameras and lenses fit. The upper compartment is a place to stash your lunch, a light jacket or all the cords and cables you need to haul along on a long trip. The divider between the two compartments is removable, so you can gut the innards and use it as a general-purpose day pack.

On the outside there are two small zippered pockets, mesh bins on the sides for maps or a water bottle and right down the front there’s a pull-out cloth tube for your tripod.

All that camera gear is heavy, and the suspension system takes the load off your back. It has a padded, built-in backpack harness that includes CollarCut shoulder straps, a sternum strap, padded waist belt, and load-adjustment straps. The back of the pack is padded and ventilated. There is also a bungee cord compression system, which tightens up the load.

The pack itself is relatively heavy at 4.5 pounds, but all that padding and protection weighs a lot.

I liked the two-part system. Most other large camera backpacks zipped all the way around, which means that you would have to lay the bag down flat to keep your gear from tumbling out. With this one, I could unzip it, hold it by the top handle and grab the cameras one-handed.

If this seems like too much bag for you, LowePro’s Orion Trekker is a smaller, lighter-weight version of the same bag, for $80.

I recommend spending an hour or so carefully examining the bags at a store like Ritz or the Camera Exchange. There are a lot of innovations and you might find a better system for hauling your valuable stuff around.