Camera bag

Aside from the bag, which is always packed and ready to go unless I'm actually doing studio work, I have umbrellas, studio flashes, a hair spot, photo-floods, a green screen and a whole raft of high res (22 mp) digital backdrops. People get a little weirded out when they see the green screen, but when they see the results they're always kind of floored. I wrote my own de-fringing plugin for WinImages, works really well with the program's various color keying facilities.

You should get a good camera bag. As you add lenses and so forth to your system, the number of dollars invested climbs very quickly. A bag like this, at about $100, can save you -- literally -- thousands of dollars.

One more thing: Notice all my lenses are stored with the lens cap up? That's a good habit to get into. Many lenses extend forward when zooming and/or focusing, and they do so on delicate gearing systems that are often connected to tiny, delicate little motors. If you store the lens with the camera mount up and the lens end down, every time the bag is bumped or placed on a surface, an acceleration (vertical shock) is applied to the down-facing surface of the lens; as the lens body is almost inevitably heavier than the part of the lens that moves, this applies the maximum amount of undesired force to the lens geartrain and associated hardware. However, if you store the lenses mount-end down, then the light end is in the air and the amount of shock to the geartrain is minimized. If that's unclear to you, just take my word for it -- your lenses will last longer if you store them mount-down.

Photo was taken with my Olympus E20 in auto mode using the on-board flash.