Packing Equipment

A couple of months ago I was at a party where a friend showed me his Canon XSi, digital SLR. Now I've owned an SLR in the past, but to be honest I never learned how to use it. It took pretty good pictures on the automatic settings, so I never felt the pressure to learn about aperture, shutter-speed, film speeds, etc. While it was in my possession, it was reduced to a very expensive point-and-shoot camera. But after seeing what John was able to coax out of his XSi, I decided I needed to get one, and more specifically that I needed to take one to Afghanistan. So I started saving a few bucks from every paycheck until I was able to buy one from Amazon.

However, taking a reasonably expensive DSLR to the desert creates a host of problems. Like: how am I going to keep it from getting pulverized by sand, snow, ice and soldiers? Well in my job, I have to ship fragile and expensive items all over the world all of the time, and I've been introduced to the magic of Pelican cases. Pelican makes all kinds of cool hardened cases in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors for any application imaginable. And they also come with foam which can be plucked out and molded into any shape... Well, so long as that shape can be made up of tiny squares.

I picked up a Pelican 1400. I guessed on the size, but it seemed like it wouldn't be so small as to be useless, and not so big as to be a giant pain to lug around. It greeted me when I got home from work tonight, and I set about customizing it to fit all of my various, fragile electronics.

The foam that comes with the case is essentially a bunch of 1 cm² columns of foam which are loosely attached to one another. This allows you to pluck out entire columns all the way to the bottom (which is a separate piece of foam, incidentally) and mold your case to fit its intended contents.

I grabbed my camera bag and started looking through it to find the items that I absolutely had to have with me, and separate them from the items that would just take up space. Once I had it narrowed down to my still camera, my video camera, assorted power and data cables, I laid them all out on top of the foam and tried to arrange them so they would all fit. Taking a tip from the Pelican Quick Start Guide, I used toothpicks to mark the corners of all the items I planned to shove in there.

After that it was pretty easy to mark the spots and start plucking out the foam. If ever you find yourself with a pocket that's too deep (for instance, my video camera is not as thick as the case is deep, so I feared it might rattle around in there), you've got all of the foam you already plucked out to fill in the gaps and give support to smaller items.

I puzzled over how to take a picture of my camera case with my camera inside of it, so I had to resort to my phone which has no flash and doesn't take the best of pictures even in adequate light. But, here's the finished product, along with all of the items that have been squeezed securely into it.

Notice that I still have some space left in the front right part of the case. Originally I was going to store a portable hard drive in there to archive images, but I've already got a reasonably hardened case for that. Maybe I can put some of the small, rewritable DVDs that my video camera takes in there.

Now I just have to worry about someone walking off with it... Maybe I can label it "MEDICAL WASTE."