NDP 2009 FunPack Hack

Here is how to hack and personalize your NDP 2009 fun pack.
I made mine into a patriotic and discreet messenger camera bag.
Originally, the bag will look like the picture shown below.

As you can see there is a beautiful piece of paper with all the sponsors for the show. Now we are going to remove the paper.

The quick and dirty way is to take a pen knife and cut below the stitching. You’ll need to cut hard enough to cut through the plastic and the paper but not too hard till you cut the bag. Once done, the paper is easily removed. Another way is to remove the stitch and sew it back together again but that would be quite tedious.

If you like, you could place a piece of paper with you name or whatever you want to put there to further personalize your bag. I just left mine empty.

So next thing you may want to do is to make it to a camera bag. If you have the padding, just place it inside and it should fit nicely. If I’m not mistaken, the padding can be gotten at TCW for quite cheap. I just used back my old Nikon padding.

One thing to note is that the bag does not have the best of stitching (what do you expect from a free bag?) so it would be advisable to either put a lighter kit inside. My strap broke today as the stitching came off. Thankfully, the camera was secure inside the bag and it fell from only 50cm high. I only had a SB600, D80 with 90mm tamron and a 50mm 1.8 in the bag. There are a few other miscellaneous stuff like keys and mp3 player but they are irrelevant.

To avoid that from happening to you, i recommend the following.

I’m thinking of replacing the strap with either a Tamrac or a OPTech strap. And if i have the time, maybe i would reinforce the stitching of the strap holder and maybe change the plastic strap holder to a metal one.