Professional adventure photographer Alex Strohl has been everywhere. The Arabian Desert, the glaciers of Alaska; you name it, and he's been there, camera in hand. And yet, in all his wanderings, one thing Strohl never found was a backpack that adequately combined features for carrying camera equipment — bodies, spare lenses, tripods and the like — with those for hauling outdoor gear to remote and often inhospitable places.
So he teamed up with Moment, a photography accessory company, to make the perfect backpack for adventurous photographers. Their creative collaboration produced the Strohl Mountain Light — a 45-liter backpack that calls to mind backpacking bags more readily than the bulky packs that photographers typically carry during trips.
Primary to the design is an ultralight construction — the backpack weighs roughly 2.2 pounds — made of Cordura ripstop. Another core element is modularity that allows the Mountain Light to adapt to various adventures. Like other backpacking packs, its lid is removable and its volume expandable; unlike most of those bags, though, it has lower back access to its main compartment that, combined with a rigid and padded insert, provides fast access to camera gear.
Moment and Strohl also cooked up an exterior camera loader that wayward photographers can attach to the pack's hipbelt or shoulder straps for even faster access.
Chief among Strohl's requests was that the bag be able to handle outdoor gear, too — so Moment loaded it with everything you'd expect of a high-grade hiking pack. It has a full waist belt, ergonomic shoulder straps with large mesh pockets for a phone or snacks, exterior mesh sleeves for stashing water bottles and extra layers, attachments for ice tools and trekking poles, and compression straps to hold everything stable inside.
If you want one, though, be ready to act fast. Moment only made 200 Strohl Mountain Light packs for its first batch, and each one comes with a limited edition print of one of Strohl's photos.
Price: $200
