Time to print!

Yesterday, I picked up my new photo printer. After much YouTube research, I decided to get the Canon imagePrograff Pro-310 photographic printer, a 13-inch professional printer. I had considered getting the Canon Pro-1100 photo printer, a 17-inch printer, but at 75lbs. a bit too big for me at this time. And too expensive; the ink tanks are huge and each one of the twelve needed costs $160 each.

Now I have to learn the ins and outs of photo printing, getting the same rendered photograph on the computer onto paper. Hopefully it won’t be too long of a process for me. I ordered some photo paper in different sizes for testing, and another set of inks as the Pro-310 has small ink tanks. Once I have it figured out, I hope to start making some limited prints; I know which one is going to be the first, but I have no idea how many to make in the first series.

In other news, I ordered a new backpack from a brand that I love, Shimoda. I bought a Shimoda Urban Explore 25-liter backpack. I loved Shimoda’s Action X25 V.2 pack when I had all of the Olympus gear last year. Now, I hope to utilize the Urban Explore with my Hasselblad and Profoto gear. I have a workshop on portrait lighting early in April, and needed more space than my Wandrd sling offers. I’ll try to do a quick review of each in the coming week or so.

Choosing a camera bag

For anyone trying to find the best camera bag, my advice is forgetaboutit! There is no perfect, one bag to rule them all. I should know by now; I spent the last three weeks looking at dozens of YouTubes and visiting too many websites to count looking for the perfect bag, and my discovery, other than that I really like bags? There is no perfect bag and there is no one bag for everything.

The first bag I started out with, storing my new camera gear, was the Tenba DNA 13 messenger bag. The Tenba DNA 13 is a solid photographer’s messenger bag, with the ability to hold lots of gear in a smaller form factor than Tenba’s DNA 16 Pro. It held all of my gear and then some, right up until the point that I ordered the OM System 100-400mm f/5.0-6.3 IS II telephoto zoom. With this, unfortunately, the bag wouldn’t do for a complete carry-all. So, I started searching for another bag, one that would absorb all of my gear, and hopefully have some room for extras.

As a result of all my YouTube watching, I decided to go for a backpack, as these bags typically are great for telephoto lenses and have lots of storage capacity. I went back to YouTube to search for best backpacks of 2025, and started watching more YouTubes. Two backpacks stood out: the PGYTech OnePro Focux 25L pack and the Summit-Creative Tenzing 25L zippered pack. I ended up buying the PGYTech backpack.

The PGYTech OnePro Focux bag is a very nice backpack, and I really did love it. It is constructed very well, is easily sizable, and huge. It lists at 25L, but the backpack seems noticeably larger than that, think 30-35L. It seems to want to fit DSLRs or mirrorless cameras with battery grips attached, huge cameras that otherwise might struggle with other bags. It seems perfect of a system built around either the Nikon Z-9, or Canon EOS R-1. I put all of my current camera gear in the backpack, and when I put on the pack, my gear seemed to shift around badly, especially my camera. Although it has velcro straps to secure gear in its respective cubby hole, the pack’s dividers are quite wide, leaving in my estimation about 3 inches of unusable space. This of course is great if you stack your lenses vertically rather than horizontally. In the end, although I really did love the bags construction and features - it has a space battery holder with indicators of whether the battery is charged or not - in the end it was simply way too big for me.

The bag that I did finally go with is the Shimoda Action X30 Women’s backpack with a large mirrorless core unit. Pics of the backpack below:

The women’s pack has special straps that s-curve at the chest, providing for a better fit for women. It’s a really comfortable fit, unique among photography backpack manufacturers. The Shimoda Action X30 is just a great pack, it contains all of my gear and then-some, and has an expandable opening on top to store even more stuff, like a rain jacket or hoodie. It comes with a raincover and a helmet holder. Although I haven’t taken the backpack out into the wild yet, I love it already. I feel the Shimoda Action X30 pack is the best photography backpack on the market currently.