When I go tramping (hiking, that is) – as I plan to do throughout the next month on New Zealand’s South Island – I usually carry a daypack for shorter trips or a larger backpack on multi-day tramps with me. Inside the backpack, there is basically all my stuff that I need for that day or couple of days, but also my photo equipment. However, I like to have my camera ready to shoot during most of the day – unless the rain is pouring down or the terrain makes walking rather difficult (I don’t do climbing; that would be a rather different story).

Here, I will concentrate on two alternatives that I have tried for carrying the camera. There are many other ways, and I don’t want to claim that I found the best solution; it is just what I found works for me and what doesn’t. There is a follow-up to this post where I consider how to carry the rest of my camera gear in my backpacks. This post is just about the camera itself.

At the last Photokina, I took the opportunity to walk over to the Sun-Sniper and Blackrapid booths to check out their solutions. Most of their straps are – at the time of writing – not that well suited for being used together with a backpack: They have rather thick shoulder pads which you can’t wear comfortably under the shoulder strap of a backpack. Having the backpack’s shoulder straps below the camera strap, on the other hand, means that you always need to take off the camera first and put it aside to take off the backpack. With my lenses and other accessories in the backpack, I would expect to take it off quite often. To avoid this, I was looking for alternatives.

At that point, Sun-Sniper’s Backpack Strap caught my eye (update: this is a newer version than mine; other companies have similar models). This is not a full shoulder strap, but just the front part in a sense. The rear part of the strap is the backpack you are carrying. For that purpose, the strap has carabiners at both ends, that you attach to loops on your backpack, one close to the top of your backpack’s shoulder strap, the other somewhere low on your pack. You’ll need to check with your backpack if you can find good places to attach the carabiners to.

This system is a good idea but for me there are three major problems. One is that it is really difficult to take off the backpack since you are intertwingled between the backpack’s own straps and the camera strap. In order to get out of that, you need to unhook one of the carabiners and hold the camera in one hand then the other to wiggle yourself out of the backpack straps or have the camera dangle around freely. Or you unhook both of the carabiners, lay the camera with the strap attached aside and then take off the backpack.

After having taken off the backpack, the second of the problems arises: What do you now do with the strap and how do you carry your camera? Maybe you could put the lower carabiner to a loop on your trousers; the other end, however, needs some point of fixation as well – and my shirts and jackets don’t have any such loops on them. So you can only carry your camera in your hand – which is not much of a problem, assuming that you have taken off the backpack for a purpose. That purpose might be taking a photo; the best case then is that the strap is just uselessly hanging there. If, however, the strap gets in your way – e.g. because you want to place the camera onto your tripod – you need to unscrew the strap from your camera, attach your camera to your tripod, detach it again and screw on the strap again. There we have the third problem: Do that ten times a day, and you’ll probably start wondering whether the system is really that good in the end.

Seeing that I won’t be happy with this solution, I now bought something very simple: a JJC ST-1 Wrist Strap. As I mentioned before, I want to have the camera ready to shoot most of the time and will be walking on rather easy paths where I usually don’t need both of my hands to get on. With a wrist strap, the camera is secured well enough so that it doesn’t drop. While I’ll usually carry the weight in my hands and not on the strap – holding it by the body or the lens, just securing it with the wrist strap –, I can also let it dangle in some situations. The wrist strap is attached to one of the camera’s strap mounts so that the tripod mount is still available and can be equipped with a mounting plate. In order to take off the backpack, I still need to figure out where to put the camera during that process – but at least putting down the camera and taking it up again is much simpler than with the backpack strap solution. Finally, the wrist strap is very small, weighs next to nothing, and a part of it can be easily detached.