My New Lowepro Stealth Reporter D300 AW

I finally decided today on a very impulse to replace my existing Lowepro 200 shoulder bag with a new Lowepro Stealth Report D300 AW. After a while of not shooting weddings, I haven’t been using my ThinkTank and have started using my old shoulder bag which I normally take on trips or on shoots during my assignment.

My old Lowepro 200 served me well for around 5 years and I have grown to like it as my go-getter, the first bag I would choose to house my camera gears on a short shoot. But as of late, this bag has been getting a little small for my gears and it gets a little cramped up.

The problem with this bag was that I just couldn’t fit in my 70-200mm lens and if I were to squeeze it in, it wouldn’t be in a very efficient manner as each time I open the bag, I would have to make sure the 70-200mm lens wouldn’t fall off the bag.

So before I started searching for a new shoulder bag, I was honestly just walking along the streets in Sdyney when I chanced upon Ted’s Camera store. I entered the store with no purpose other than to just browse through the various gears to bring myself up to speed on whats the latest and greatest in the camera world (yes, I have been rather disconnected and yes, I didn’t know that Canon had a 6D).

Whilst I was deciding on whether I should get a Joby Gorillapod for travelling, I saw a large variety of bags on display and picked out the Lowepro Stealth Reporter D300 AW.

The first thing I asked the store assistant was whether can I fit in the Canon 70-200mm F2.8 lens into the bag and unfortunately, the store didn’t have that particular lens in store for me to try it out. What I like about here in Australia is the extra service the store assistants offer. She went over and took a couple of long telephoto lenses to let me try putting them into the bag and when she brought the Canon 100-400mm lens and showed me that it fitted in nicely, I was almost immediately sold. She also then went on the mention that the 100-400mm lens was around 1cm shorter compared to the 70-200mm lens but it still had enough space in the D300 AW.

Honestly if the store assistant didn’t bother asking me how my day was or giving me all that help, I would have probably left the store without buying anything and headed to the nearest Crumpler store and getting a replacement there!

Of course the other features which I thought would be extremely useful is the ability to reach for lenses and gears without opening the flap of the bag! This meant better efficiency! Another feature that was missing in my old bag was the all-weather rain cover. A good feature to have especially when I was caught in the rain during a couple of outdoor shoots.

Finally the only downside I can find is that the bag is larger in size but again the D300 is indeed a model size larger compared to the Nova 200. I did see the D200 AW on sale but it couldn’t fit a long telephoto lens hence I decided against it.

When I use it for my next assignment on the 6th of April, I will probably write a review on the bag.

p.s. Apologies for the quality of the images here. I used my iPhone and had to process them all via the iPhone as I didn’t bring my Mac to edit the images. When I have the time at home, I will probably replace these images later.