5 Great tips for photo equipment storage

As professional photographers for the last 10 years, we have come up with a few good storage ideas for our photography equipment.

We live near the ocean, where there is a lot of moisture in the air, so proper storage is extremely important.

These are my favorite equipment storage tips.

• We store each camera body and lens in it’s own separate plastic airtight box.  If there is fungus on one lens, you don’t want it spreading to the others. The boxes are labeled so that we always store the lens in the same box, and we can tell if a lens is missing. We use Snapware because it is airtight, inexpensive, and comes in a variety of sizes.  All our batteries and cards are also stored this way.

• We put desiccants in each box.  We use Interteck reusable blue silica gel packets.  They turn pink when they need to be changed, and they can be renewed and reused by drying them out in the oven.

• We labeled the lens hoods using a permanent white oil-based marking pen so we know which hood belongs to which lens, and then store them in the box with the lens.

• We have a large Snapware box where we often store one camera body, lens, battery and card so it is ready to assemble and use at a moment’s notice.

• When we are on an assignment our empty cards are in one card case (the green one in the picture) and the used ones are in a distinctly different case that is watertight and shock resistant.  We don’t want to mix up the cards, and the ones with photos are much more valuable.

One last note:  Any storage system only works if you actually use it.  So we take apart the cameras after each shoot and put everything away (or, at least, we try to).