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:
- 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.
- 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.
- It's hard to extend the system to carry two cameras or additional gear, other than by carrying a separate backpack.
- 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.
Kinesis h717 x harness
The core of the Kinesis system is the h717 x-harness. It's a bit like the shoulder-harness system of a decent back pack. It
fits like those baby-carriers, over the shoulders and looping back under the armpits. The straps aren't just bits of tape:
they're structures built of several layers and shaped in three dimensions. The 717 is designed so load is transferred
from the shoulder straps down the back and under the arms, creating tension left-to-right across
the two "staves" down the front. For this reason it's necessary to connect the chest strap if you don't have a
bag mounted.
Each part of the harness is completely adjustable so it really fits your torso, rather than just hanging
off your shoulders. The straps are wide, and weight-distribution aside, they sit where they're supposed to sit.
Overall it fits much better than a simple piece of tape.
Without any other bits you can clip a Lowe Pro TLZ bag (or the Kinesis equivalent) on here and you're
in business. Alternatively, buy a couple of little straps (h435) to fit on your camera body,
and you can mount the camera without using a bag. Both approaches work well and allow you to shoot without
disconnecting anything. There's a little stabilizing strap you can use to hold the camera down if you're not using a
bag.
Everything on the harness is removable. Don't ever want to use a bag? You can remove the d-ring connectors.
The harness itself is a gear fetishist's wet dream - black, with straps and adjusters everywhere. Straight out of mission
impossible. You'd probably get beaten up in most pubs I know wearing something like this, but out on the mountain
it's just the thing. You can wear it under a jacket for added discretion.
connectors
Separate connectors are provided high on the shoulder for D-rings or camera straps. These are located where they should be,
and the design largely stops them moving forward or down.
I bought some of the Kinesis camera connector straps and buckles, which offer Op-tech style quick-release. Whilst there's a lot
of flexibility in this type of system, on balance it's not for me. I found that the tail-pieces with the connectors dangling off my bodies
and [long] lenses just got in the way all the time. The last thing you want when you're changing lenses on the fly is a connector and
bit of strap getting into your mirror system, and this is a serious risk if you use this type of system. After some experimentation I
dumped the quick-release system.
I just have a tape loop through each camera/ lens eye, then I can crab this onto something with either a proper snap-link or some
other clip (eg the clips on Ortlieb waterproof bags etc).
stability
The most important thing with this type of gear is how it moves, or rather doesn't move, when you do. Vigorous activity can
persuade the harness to move upwards (but not down). Performance here is streets ahead of the simple tape, but on balance
and after considerable use I think the simple Lowe Pro tape harnesses work just as well but are simpler.
straps
Some of the straps (eg the upper and lower d-ring mounts) suffer from creep - hang a lot of weight off them and they'll
gradually unthread. As these specific straps are designed to be removable, they don't have an end stop. You'll soon notice that they've slipped
however, once your lens starts gently tapping you between the legs. Thread all the straps back through themselves to avoid this issue..
then replace the tape with something wider like I did.
buckles
One of the small but important buckles my the harness broke. Maybe this was baggage-handler activity, or possibly someone
stood on the harness somewhere. But these things happen, and the failure of a single buckle could be a fairly serious problem in the
back-country. I replaced the buckle with an alternative one, but I think these buckles might benefit from being larger and stronger.
Generally there seem to be two different sizes of small buckles on the harness - I'd like to see a single size used so
everything's hot-swappable, and I'd like to see all the buckles being bigger.
in the snow
This is where you really find out if things work. Overall the Kinesis harness scores kind of so-so in these conditions. The bag rides
reasonably well, and I didn't notice it banging into my chin (which is what you get with the Low Pro chest harnesses). On the other
hand it's a low rider.... check the image out and you'll see that there's not a lot of space between the bottom of the bag and my knees.
On occasion there was definitely contact there, and if the conditions had been better I'd have been banging the lens hood on a regular
basis.
Left-right stability was ok, but then I ride with a quiet upper body so you'd not expect trouble here. When wearing the harness with a shovel pack I experimented
with threading pack's chest-strap and the waist belt through the back of the bag, but that didn't make a lot of difference.
Look closely at the image and you'll see my main bitch with the whole setup: the little "wings" which make up the harness's front tend to be a bit unruly under
load. I think this area of the design could use a bit more work.
In the end if I was riding with a shovel pack I gave up on using the harness - it was just too much complexity and straps for no obvious advantage. So if you're
riding with a pack, you can do just as well with the shoulder-strap d-rings and the waist belt, which is kind of a shame but there it is.