At the 2012 PhotoPlus Expo in New York, Damon Webster of Photoinduced.com
asked me to give him a demo of the new Rotation180º photo daypack. We
had just unveiled MindShift Gear to the public and were stationed in the
corner of the Think Tank Photo booth. Hurricane Sandy was bearing down
on Manhatten and there was a lot of energy in the exhibit hall. Here's my off the cuff pitch of the pack's primary features.
You can support the effort to launch MindShift Gear by backing our Rotation180º project on Kickstarter.com.
For my entire career I've
preferred photo waist packs as my primary bags for landscape and climbing photography. Often enough its just not feasible to put all my camera gear on the ground to access it. I used the
old Galen Rowell/FotoFlex waist pack for years. It worked like a portable workbench mounted on my hips. When it wore out I used LowePro's Orion AW. I blew out the seams on that and have since been using Think Tank Photo's burly SpeedRacer.
These have worked great for shooting but don't support a tripod or allow for
all the other stuff I need to take on a day of photographing in poor weather or when teaching workshops in remote places. Photo backpacks are perfectly fine for getting to a location but
not very convenient as a bag from which you actually shoot in wild environments. So lately I've
been fortunate to work alongside conservation photographer Daniel Beltrá and the amazing designers at
Think Tank Photo to help develop an
innovative solution. Our result is a ground breaking new photo daypack that I'm
really happy with. After several years of work the testing and design is finally
complete for our new Rotation180º Professional pack. I’ll post some more photos and
a detailed preview of features shortly.
We have put together
a new company called MindShift Gear to design this and other innovative photo
products for outdoor adventure and conservation photographers. Our primary startup team
is Doug Murdoch and Mike Sturm, co-founders of Think Tank Photo and designers with 25 years of experience, conservation photographer Daniel Beltrá, marketing whiz Brian Erwin, and myself. We would be sunk without the help of graphic designer Larry Atil and Doug Bush for customer service. There are a number of other great
folks who have supported us in SO many ways and without their patience this
would never have happened. Thanks!
Back in October Daniel and I went to New York and unveiled the Rotation180º at the PhotoPlus Expo. It was a big hit and we received great feedback from photographers. On Monday,
December 3rd, we launched a month long Kickstarter.com crowd-sourced fund raising
campaign to enable us to produce the first run of bags. Its gotten off to an
amazing start for the first few days and we have been astounded at the response
from the photo community. We reached our minimum funding goal in just thirteen
hours and after a couple days have reached more than 200% of our goal. I hope
you will take a look and consider helping us make this a reality by pledging to receive one
of the first edition packs and sharing the project with your friends.
A couple years ago I had the opportunity to photograph avant cellist Zoë Keating in a redwood forest near her home in Occidental. The images were for her album "Into the Trees." Her work is incredibly inspiring and has been playing in my car or ipod while making many many images. This morning I ran a cross a video of her performing Lost and was reminded of this image below an old growth redwood that you could live in if indeed you were lost in the woods. It was a bit theatrical for the album but was one of my favorite images from the shoot.
