Psst! There’s a giveaway going on! You can enter a handmade DIwYatt item! Enter here!

Yesterday I hinted at Hubs’ Valentine gift to me. And even though it wasn’t necessarily a Valentine’s specific present, I was still super excited to open it on Friday when it arrived on our doorstep.

It’s our new camera bag!

Since getting our fancy Nikon D3200 for each other as part of our Christmas presents to ourselves, we’ve been shopping for a good bag to keep it safe in.

We looked around at several stores around here, and on a few websites. Since we never really found anything that was perfect, we decided to find a semi-cheaper option online and use it for awhile until we found something better.

It was Hub’s job to do the online shopping and he narrowed it down to three options of which we then chose our final winner.

We like that this one has a removable insert, with removable little dividers that provide a bunch of cushion-y padding. That way we can always get a new bag down the road but keep this one to use for something else (future diaper bag?) or use this cushioned insert in a backpack if we are on vacation or something.

After playing around with the placement of those dividers for awhile, we came up with the following arrangement.

We’re only using one of the dividers right now which gives us two big pockets. We placed our large lens on the left and the camera body on the right.

Then, we topped the lens compartment with a piece of squishy foam (the technical term) from our initial camera box to give us room to add our second lens. There’s even room for the battery over on the right side.

Yes, we know we’re missing a lens cap. It is going to arrive soon in the mail. 🙂

Then, I just placed the last divider on top for some extra protection.

All in all, it will haul a lot of supplies!

Plus, we had room for some cables and our manual, since we often need to refer to it in these early stages of learning.

Right now we don’t have anything in the outside pockets.

I like that it isn’t black or gray like a traditional camera bag. It looks a little more like a “regular” bag, I think. Hubs says it looks a little too much like a purse, but to me, the squareness of it makes it clear it’s a camera bag.

I also like that it has both snaps…

and a zipper to keep everything nice and secure inside.

Of course it isn’t a fancy name brand or designer bag. It’s from a pretty random, in my opinion, online shop. In fact, the label is even written in two languages… which Hubs actually thinks is awesome.

Still, it was a great deal and we like it for now, so I’m happy. In fact, I’m so happy with it that I want to take it everywhere, even places I wouldn’t really need the camera…

Since we’re really amateur photographers, we’re still figuring out exactly what we want to stash in all those pockets. Advice on some sweet items to stuff in there?