I carry my camera with me everywhere I go, and usually that means just throwing it in my purse. Even though I’m glad to have my camera with me, I’m always worried about it getting banged around, because it’s not like purses are built for carrying thousands of dollars’ worth of photo equipment. It’s at this point in the conversation that guys always say, “Just get a camera bag.” Yeah, but the thing is, camera bags are ugly. And then that means carrying my purse and something else. And that something else screams, “Expensive photo equipment inside!” I fully expect that, by this point, I will have lost all male readers, and that’s fine. Ladies, you hear me, right?

I searched far and wide for the right camera bag: One that would look like a purse, but be padded like a camera bag and keep my gear safe. One that was small enough that I could carry it with me everywhere without feeling like I should be stopping off at a Hudson News for water and a magazine. One that wasn’t meant to carry everything I own—just my camera with a lens attached, plus my wallet, sunglasses, glasses, and sundry purse-type items. You can find a range of bags out there for women (just Google “camera bags for women” and you’ll see what I mean), but the only one that met all my requirements was this one, by Ketti Handbags.

Here’s the catch: Ketti Phillips is the woman behind this operation, and as far as I can tell, the “operation” consists of Ketti and one seamstress. So, her production is very slow. The woman has kids and a husband and is a photographer on top of making these bags, so it’s understandable. But still, it means that within seconds (yes, seconds) of her posting a few new bags to her store every Monday at 9 a.m. PST, she’s sold out. I’ve read stories online about people enlisting all their family members to try to get one of these bags, and although there was a sort of nostalgia to this way of shopping (it reminds me calling Ticketmaster for concert tickets in college), I just don’t have it in me. So, I took the easy (and more expensive) way out and ordered my bag from Cosy Cameras, a store in the U.K. I placed the order on the evening of May 9 and received it today. The shipment was fast, and the customer service was great.

Here are my impressions of the bag so far:

• There’s a large padded removable strip that’s meant to go on the bottom of the bag. (You can remove it and the other two pads if you want to use the bag strictly as a purse.) I found it difficult to get this padded strip in place at the bottom of the bag. I was sure I was going to rip the bag trying to get it to fit, but with some finagling, it worked, and I realize now that it’s made to fit perfectly. It was just harder to squeeze in there than I expected. The good news is, it provides plenty of padding on the bottom of the bag, so your camera is protected from every which way.
• The two padded dividers are standard photo-bag-type dividers that match the interior lining. I found that you have to kind of push down on the padded bottom to force the Velcro strips to the bottom of the bag. If you don’t, and you just attach the pads from the padded base to the top, they’ll be taller than the pads that you attach the Velcro strips to, and they’ll also interfere with your opening of the zippered pocket. This adjustment isn’t difficult to do at all—it just took me a few minutes to realize that’s what I had to do.
• When I load up this bag, I can fit everything I fit in my normal purse. I don’t have room for any books or my iPad or any of the things I could fit in my non-padded purse of this size, but that’s to be expected. If I were flying, I would probably put my camera in my dedicated camera bag (that holds all my lenses and other gear) and use this bag as my purse. And then when I got to my destination, I could revert to using this as my day bag with my camera inside.
• Last but not least: This bag is cute as hell! It looks fantastic with anything. And best of all, it keeps my camera safe without looking like a camera bag.

Big thumbs up!

(Source: shop.holstee.com)

"My suggestion is that whenever you have to choose, always choose the unknown, because the known you have already lived. Never miss the unknown. Always choose the unknown and go headlong. Even if you suffer, it is worth it—it always pays."

Osho (via lashla)

Me, at 24

When I was 24, I saw Titanic five times in the theater. Five times. That year, at an office team-building retreat, we were playing a Pictionary-type game—we all had to write down the titles of our favorite movies and other people had to draw them. I wrote “Titanic.” When someone guessed it in two seconds (how hard is it to draw a ship hitting an iceberg?), everybody said, “Whose clue was this?” I called out, with complete enthusiasm and zero shame, “That’s me!” One of my co-workers shook her head and said, “Oh, Elizabeth, you poor, poor girl.” Okay, I added that last part, but she did say, “Oh, Elizabeth.” That was the first hint I had that something might be wrong.

In the years since, I’ve caught portions of Titanic on TV, but I’ve never watched it again in its entirety. (Throw commercials into the mix, and you need almost a whole day.) So, recently, I went to the theater to see the movie in 3-D. And my response was pretty much what my former co-worker knew back in 1997: It was a self-indulgent, sentimental, syrupy fairy tale, trying to appeal to all audiences (romance! drama! action! history!) and getting just about nothing right.

As I walked back to my apartment, I kept thinking, “Who was I at 24 that this was something I loved so much that I paid to sit through it five times? Who the hell was I?” I came up with a few answers:

1. I still wanted to believe in fairy tales. I wanted to believe that some dashing young man with a carefree spirit and a loyal heart would rescue me. Early in the movie, Jack tells Rose that she’s the only one who can rescue herself, but come on, we all know what happened: She wouldn’t have left that high-society life without his intervention. She would’ve gotten on the lifeboat with her mother and Kathy Bates and married Cal and become everything she once hated. There’s nothing wrong with needing a hero, someone to grab us by the shoulders and shake some sense into us. And all the better if he has perfect blond hair that keeps falling into his deep blue eyes, right?

I wasn’t bold at 24. I did what I was supposed to do. I was a good girl. And I wanted someone to shake me out of it. What I didn’t know then is that, in time, with plenty of mistakes along the way, I would do that for myself. And I wouldn’t want to ask a guy, any guy, even a cute one, to do it for me.

2. I thought everything was better ramped up. In my 20s, I had a way of making the mundane melodramatic. And I loved having my emotions manipulated in music, books, and especially movies. It wasn’t enough for a ship to be sinking and taking thousands of people down with it; there had to be a chase scene with Billy Zane and a gun and rushing water and locked gates! Sometimes this penchant for melodrama worked out for me. I’ll never forget a dramatic love letter left on my doorstep, a phone call to the guy who wrote it, and the door thrown open to a kiss straight out of the movies. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen if you don’t think it’s supposed to, and thinking it was supposed to led to some good memories. But when I was 24, I didn’t realize that sometimes the deepest feelings, the truest feelings, aren’t the loudest or most dramatic, and they’re never accompanied by Celtic music or Celine Dion.

3. I had a very active fantasy life. When I was 22, 23, 24, I used to come home from work and play “Wonderful Tonight” on my boom box and pretend I was dancing with the guy I had a crush on. I was playing make-believe, but instead of being 6 in my parents’ basement with a box of my mom’s old clothes, I was in my 20s and not really ready to grow up and do things for real. I lived through movies like Titanic. I saw myself in Rose, and I wanted the kind of adventure she went on to have. But most of all I wanted to fall in love and have sex in the backseat of a car and almost get caught. And at 24, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I was grown up and there was no one to catch me.

(Source: The Atlantic)

Here’s what bothers me about the backlash against Lena Dunham’s new HBO series, Girls: Who ever said this show had to represent all girls? As far as I can tell, not HBO, not Dunham, not Judd Apatow, not anybody connected to the show. So what we have here is a situation where people wanted a show to be something it never claimed to be and then were outraged when the show didn’t live up to their expectations.

Here’s what I want and like in my TV: the vision of the person behind it. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it on Atlantic.com yesterday, “I’m not very interested in Lena Dunham reflecting the aspirations of people she may or may not know. I’m interested in her specific and individual vision; in that story she is aching to tell.”

Facegram

I hate pretty much everything about Facebook, and I think Mark Zuckerberg is sort of creepy. Besides, Twitter is everything I love about the Internet, so what do I need with Facebook? Every time I read an article about Facebook’s privacy settings or how they use people’s information, I’m relieved that I don’t have to worry about that bullshit.

I started using Instagram a year ago, and immediately it became the only way I took pictures with my phone. Yes, I posted plenty of pictures of my dog. But it was also a great way for me to check out things that I wanted to come back to later with my “real” camera. Plus, there was a community there that felt like my Twitter community.

So, this morning, when the news broke about Facebook buying Instagram, I was incredibly disappointed. I felt like I had no choice but to close my Instagram account. I didn’t want to be a part of the “Walmart of the Internet,” as Dalton Rooney put it.

So, I started looking at alternatives to Instagram, something with filters that were subtle, not obtrusive; something with a community of good photographers, instead of crappy photographers trying to look good; something with a good interface.

I didn’t find it.

I’m torn. I don’t shop at Walmart, and I really have no desire to be part of Facebook. But Instagram was a huge part of my life, one I don’t want to give up. Can Facebook own Instagram without owning the Instagram community? That’s my real question. Will they take over everything and make us log in via Facebook? Will they slam us with ads? What will they do with our location information? In other words, will I feel like I’m on Instagram or Facebook?

The articles I’ve read today seem to hold up Google’s purchase of YouTube or Amazon’s purchase of Zappos as examples of how this could be good for everyone, or at least how users won’t notice the difference. I hope they’re right.