How Lowepro Can You Go?

To malign Gertrude Stein once again, when is a bag not a bag not a bag? Answer: when said bag is a Lowepro, the choice of peripatetic professionals toting expensive digital gear, from laptops to cameras, and sometimes both at once. The bag above is their Stealth Reporter D550 AW, ostensibly for photojournalists, but hyper-useful for those of us who never the leave the house without an array of hardware sensitive to the thousand natural shocks such gadgets are heir to. To slip, perchance to fall? No problem with the heavily padded and ergonomically correct Lowepro over your shoulder.

I was recently on a longish trip and had my laptop, digital camera, iPod, battery chargers of various provenance, batteries and cables, et al -- all snugly packed into one of Lowepro's "slingbags," which quickly shift from 'carry mode' to 'ready mode' in seconds. Say you're hiking through the hills near Peshawar and you spot Bin Laden in a game of volleyball -- bingbingbing, you go from pack mule to shutterbug without fuss or muss or losing the shot. Tell him his day is coming.

The choice is yours: pay a wee bit more and buy a bag that's better-made than almost any consumer-oriented product out there and rest easy -- your sensitive digital stuff is insulated from heat and cold, accidents and careless handling. Before I went Lowepro, I carried a bag that spit out my Macbook laptop twice at airports after security screening, denting the enclosure and cracking the screen. As the JDL used to say, never again!