Last year, one of my pandemic hobbies was buying old Nikon digital SLRs. I bought several models from the turn of the millennium and ended up with a bit of a problem: I had nowhere to put them. I already had my Pentax film and digital SLRs to store, in addition to my 16 lenses, flash, modifiers, filters, accessories, and of course, many of the boxes all of it came in. All of it was shoved into the top two shelves of a disorganized closet.
I took a few hours to it into something more structured, and I was able to get most of my extra camera bodies onto the top shelf and out of the way. I had enough room left for my D750, my lenses, and accessories on their own shelf at eye level. That said, space was tight and I only had room for my D750 as my active camera body.
Fast forward a year and I’ve purchased yet another camera body, but this time I intend to use it on a regular basis. It can’t live on my top shelf jammed in with all of those boxes. It will often have a lens on it and needs to be just as available as my D750 is. Once again, I have no good way to store all of my crap. I considered different options including putting a shelf on the wall or leveraging a book case in the office but ultimately decided that the closet was still the safest place. It reduced dust and protected thousands of dollars of equipment from being knocked down by our cat into a sea of my tears.
I took some time to re-reorganize the closet this time around but I’m quite proud of myself. I found a small book case that was in the “canceled yard sale of 2020” pile in the basement and repurposed it as a shelf. We have a super tall gap on the top shelf of the closet so this tiny book case made a quick solution that otherwise would require me to buy and mount a real shelf. On this I put all of my lens and camera boxes which were previously taking up most of the shelf depth. That made room for me to move all of my filter and accessory boxes up and freed space for my cameras and lenses.
Instead of a mishmash of lenses scattered around with camera bodies interspersed, I now have a pretty distinct separation: lenses on the right, and camera bodies (mostly) on the right. Things look clean, both of my active bodies fit, and there is still slack room for other items to be added in the future. I can channel my inner hillbilly-Martha Stewart on occasion.
Relatively Ambitious 