camera harness systems

I lug my cameras around a lot, and it's a bit of a pain really. I daren't leave the things in my car because they're too expensive, and I daren't leave them at home because the light will always be amazing where I am if I do that. So I carry the things around. Some people have beer guts, I have cameras: it's my little burden.

About a decade ago some ski photographer friends introduced me to the concept of chest mounting cameras. This works brilliantly for snowboard/ ski photography. You have easy and rapid access to the camera, but it doesn't interfere with your boarding. You can even crash and burn without much fuss. You need a bag for the camera (Lowe Pro TLZ 75 for me), plus a little chest harness to hang it around your shoulders. The chest harness comes for free with the larger TLZ bags; you have to pay extra for it with some of the baby bags. Here it is in action (right).

The system works pretty well for general walking and climbing too (left). Both these shots show the bag used with a day sack, although the harness system is completely independent of the sack.

The Lowe Pro system is pretty good, and I've used it successfully for many years. The zips on the bags fail after a few season's use, but Lowe Pro's lifetime guarantee has meant a free replacement for me each time I've worn out a bag.

I've a few gripes with the system though:

1. The Lowe-Pro harnesses are basically just two pieces of tape joined to form an "X". There are hooks at each end to connect to the four D-rings (2 top, 2 bottom) on the TLZ bags. These work ok, but the tape's only a cm or so wide and there's nothing in the design to position the TLZ bag or to stop it moving around. So what happens is that the thing tries to dangle down as low as it can, until you jump off something, at which point momentum carries it upwards towards your chin. It's entirely livable with, but it could be better.
2. If you take your camera out of the TLZ bag to use, you either have to zip up the lid, or let it flap around, risking getting it full of powder or worse. I quite often ride with my camera in one hand, and it's a pain when the bag flap starts waving around.
3. It's hard to extend the system to carry two cameras or additional gear, other than by carrying a separate backpack.
4. The harness doesn't work without the bag. You need to take the bag off sometimes, which leaves you with a piece of unstructured tape. Try to take a leak with a chest mounted bag and you'll understand why this is an issue.

Hence I'd been keeping an eye out for something better than a bit of old tape to hold my pride and joy in place.

climbing gear?

I'd thought of using a caving (SRT) chest-harness, or a european-style climbing chest harness. The problem with these is that although they're generally much more adjustable and better fitting, they're designed to do something other than hold a chest-mounted camera bag in place. I didn't find a solution to the "my bag wants to bounce up and down from my balls to my chin" problem here.

lowe pro street and field?

Lowe Pro make good gear, so I looked hard at their "Street and Field" system. This is a nerdish- looking contraption which comprises a huge wide belt with fancy gold stripes on it and a sort of Y-shaped harness which goes over the shoulders, kind of like braces. (Americans will have to insert "suspenders" where I say "braces" - in the UK suspenders are only worn by straight boys in Rocky Horror showings.) To be fair, there is a slightly less huge belt, but it's still a gaudy looking thing. Perhaps you could use a permanent marker to colour it black.

I haven't tried this in anger, but the whole thing seems just too big and clunky to me. To judge from Lowe Pro's marketing, it's apparently designed to hold little id-passes rather than chest-mounted cameras. In any case, it's not clear that you could ride with a belt-based system in any sensible way, and all of the this "street and field" stuff seems to be belt based - you can't rig it without the belt.

kinesis

I looked at the various niche manufacturers, but still couldn't find anything. I'd kept an eye on Kinesis for some time, but although I'd heard people rave about them, the gear looked fiddly and they didn't seem to have any chest harnesses which were significantly different from Lowe Pro's.

Then earlier this year they launched a new harness which seemed to fit the bill precisely. It looked like those baby carrier harnesses you see people with. If you think about it, carting a large camera around a mountain might not be too dissimilar to carrying an infant around Sainsbury's. Apart from the smell. And the noise. And the temperature, and the food... ok, it's not the same, but maybe those parents were on to something in baggage design at least.

If you're ordering things from the US to be delivered into the UK it's all fraught and it can be painful, but the prices are cheap. You may as well make sure you get enough stuff in one delivery, as there's a hefty fixed-cost in hassle if not in cash. I ordered the Kinesis x-harness plus a bag full of all the bits I could find.

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