Thursday, June 25, 2009

Tamrac Rolling Studio case for travel



Underwater photographers frequently ask what I use to transport my housings when flying to exotic destinations around the world. Back in the days when airlines were generous and gave divers large baggage allowances I used the industry standard pelican case.  It was both big and heavy duty.  The bummer if any is that it weighed a lot.

Over the last 3-4 years airlines around the world have dramatically decreased the number of bags and weight allowed. As spending hundreds of dollars on excess baggage is not something I want to do on each leg of a journey, I did some research and looked for heavy duty cases that were light weight.   In the end I selected the Rolling Studio case made by Tamrac, the leader manufacturer of bags & cases for professional photographers.  It is large and reinforced with light weight plastic armor.  Empty the case weighs about 20 pounds.

Today I did a dry run just to see how much I could put in and I was amazed.  I packed two u/w camera housings, 4 ports, 4 large strobes, 5 sets of sync cords, 2 extra strobe batteries, 2 strobe chargers, 2 camera battery chargers, tools, and spare parts.  The total weight was 55 pounds.  If I had to take 5 pounds of gear out, I could and put in my other suitcase.  



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