Alpaka Elements Tech Case as a Camera Bag
It holds a full-frame camera, flash, hood, and accessories
I've been using the Alpaka Elements Tech Case as an everyday carry camera bag for the past year, first for a Fujifilm X100F and now a Sony a7cII. The MSRP is $70 USD however it regularly goes on sale for the $50 that I paid. Overall the bag is great and is the smallest that can accommodate my use-case. If you also have a small camera then I would recommend getting it.
The outside is pretty plain. The front has a simple black zipper with a small pocket where I store a notebook and a pen. The bag comes with two different straps. The fancier strap has a magnetic component which can snap apart in the middle. The magnet doesn't handle sheer force so it's pretty secure. I used this strap for most of the time that I had the bag. After it stuck to a metal fork and made a mess I switched to the plain strap.
The main compartment has a large zipper that wraps around a large portion of the bag, and is opened using two zippers, making it easy to insert and remove the camera. Inside the bag are multiple pockets on both sides of the main compartment.
For the use-case of storing a camera there is an annoying divider going down the center of the bag. Luckily it can be pushed aside and the camera fits on either side. I am considering cutting out the center divider to make it even easier to take the camera out but that would require some effort to keep it nice looking.
Despite appearing small the bag is spacious. I keep the following items in the bag:
- Sony a7c II full-frame camera
- Sony 40mm f2.5 G lens
- Haoge LH-S245N Metal Lens Hood
- Godox iT30 Pro S flash
- Peak Design Leash camera strap
- LensPen NLP-1
- Small notebook and pen
- Press badge and business cards
- N-95 mask
- Spare SD Cards
The LensPen sits nicely in the main compartment on the outside of the dividers. Be careful though as it can fall out when opening the bag. The memory cards, badge, mask, and business cards fit in the side pockets inside the main compartment. They're the hardest thing to remove from the bag but they're also the items I use the least.
I leave the flash inside of the felt bag that it shipped with to keep it from scratching the camera body. The flash sits on the right side of the main compartment. The camera with hood attached sits on the left side with the lens pointed down.
The Peak Design Leash folds over on top of the camera and flash and is the outermost item in the bag. The PD leash is likely the only camera strap that fits this combination. The larger Peak Design straps are too big, nylon rope straps are too thick, and OEM straps tend to be too thick in the middle as well. The Peak Design cuff would also fit.
Overall I highly recommend this bag. It has enough padding for its size and I'm comfortable leaving the camera in it. It's small but fits this setup quite nicely. It should fit most APSC and rangefinder cameras. The bag goes on sale at least once every winter so keep an eye out. Note that only the orange and gray variants seem to go on sale. Also note that Alpaka has made a newer version of this bag and while it looks mostly the same I'm not positive if it still fits everything.
Thomas Hunter II is a Software Engineer with 18+ years building scalable, production-grade systems. Deep expertise in Node.js, observability, and developer tooling, with a strong track record of driving architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and improving customer facing technical documentation. Author of 5 books (including O'Reilly), certified by the OpenJS Foundation, and frequent international conference speaker.
