My Review of the Nadine Weekender Camera Bag for Women
I’ve just come back from a week at the beach. Lucky me eh? Well, it wasn’t all work and no play. When you work for yourself, vacations always involve a little bit of “work” so my days of hopping on a jet with merely my toothbrush and overnight bag in hand are long gone!
These days you are more likely to see me with 10 different bags for 10 different purposes. A bag for my laptop. A bag for my camera. A bag for my other electronics. Never mind the snack bag, the toy/entertainment for the kids bag and of course a sick bag for my littlest bad traveller 🙁
So you can image my delight when the kind people at Aide de Camp sent me the beautiful Nadine camera bag to review. They were adamant that I gave it a thorough testing and let me tell you, I jumped at the chance to give it a work out!
The Nadine bag is much bigger than my previous camera bags – yes – I’ve had a few! This is because not only does that Nadine comfortably fit my Canon 7D + additional lens and speedlight, it can also accommodate my laptop. And friends, my laptop is not one of these svelte wafer thin things, but a very desperate-for-an-upgrade MacBook 15″ dinosaur. And it all fit in the Nadine bag! PLUS I even had room for my external hard drive that I felt necessary to take as a back up due to the age of my computer – did I mention I need an upgrade?
Make no mistake, this mean’t that Nadine was packed to capacity but it still zippered closed no problem , with a double zip to help me out. It also mean’t that it now was quiet heavy and I wouldn’t recommend carrying this lot on a shoot, but for the proposes of my trip and having everything contained it was excellent. If I had have been hopping on a jet, Nadine even has a little trolley sleeve in the back to slip over your luggage handles to make it easy to navigate the airport. Perfect for weekend getaways.
So lets take a closer look at this beauty!
The Nadine is positioned as Aide De Camp’s Weekender bag so your getting a lot more bag than something which will only fit your DSLR. First off, she arrived beautifully packaged within her own dust bag and in a gorgeous black box. No danger of it getting damaged in transit.
Unlike my previous camera bags, Nadine is made from a wonderful lightweight but durable premium canvas material. I can’t stress enough how important this is as camera gear can get really heavy. It’s also water resistant. I have the beautiful slate color which is a delicate grey, but she’s also available in cream and charcoal. I was a bit worried that it might show the dirt but so far so good and I think a quick rub with a dampened sponge would clean up any messes.
Two long shoulder straps means that it easily carried and I found that it sat really well on my body. Because its so light weight, I would have no problem using this as an everyday bag – I love its “oversizeness” and I’m known for carrying everything but the kitchen sink in my purses!
The interior like I have said, is super roomy with several zippered pockets which I used for lipbalm, and business cards. But here’s my absolute favorite thing about Nadine. The padded camera insert is fully removable and she turns into a regular bag! This means you can cut down on yet another bag when traveling as I nearly always take a ginormous purse with me. Now I can just leave all the lenses and stuff at the hotel if I’m heading out for an evening, armed with just my cell phone in my bag for all the usual selfies 🙂
If you are a mommy with kiddos still in diapers you will absolutely adore Nadine. Not only does she have enough room to stash a few diapers and wipes and a spare change of clothes for your littles, the laptop protection sleeve can double as a diaper changing mat. Totally ingenious!
As you can see from my photos this bag really packs a hell of a punch in both functionality and style – both of which are extremely important to us ladies!
You can check out the Nadine bag here at Aide de Camp or order from B & H Photo here.
Happy snapping
Ingrid