Tom's Tips - The Geek's Guide to Carrying your Gear while Saving your Shoulders

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The Geek's Guide to Carrying your Gear while Saving your Shoulders

Posted on Monday, November 24, 2008 at 10:50 AM

How to easily carry all of your gear
and save your shoulders
(As long as you don't mind looking like a Geek)

Anyone who has seen Clint Eastwood's movie The Outlaw Josey Wales knows how important it can be to get to your gear fast.
And the same is true for birders. Although not as dangerous as the Federales, birds do have a habit of popping up
unexpectedly. And you want to be ready, with your scope, your microphone and your cameras instantly available.

GEAR LISTS ARE GROWING

The list of gear typically carried by birders in the field is growing.
Now it is not uncommon to carry a shotgun microphone, field recorder, ipod for playback, speaker,
binoculars, telescope and tripod. In addition many birders are carrying a DSLR camera complete with a long (and heavy) lens.
And the body parts bearing the brunt of these loads are typically the neck and shoulders.

Typical group of camera-lugging birders

In recent years binocular straps have evolved to a harness-like system that takes the weight off the neck.
Especially with some of the newer and heavier high-powered binocs, using a harneFss can mean the difference
between feeling like you're carrying a lodestone and not even noticing the weight of your optics.
But what about the camera, scope and other gear?

TRADITIONAL CARRYING METHODS EXPLOIT THE SHOULDERS

For short stints of an hour or two, the traditional method of carrying your scope over one shoulder and a camera over
the other works OK. But if you're going into the field for longer periods, especially for trips of day
after day of birding, you can soon start to feel like you've been worked over by the Marquis de Sade,
or the Inquisition. And, although you're sure your gear originally weighed only 5 or 6 pounds,
towards the end of the day you can start to feel like you're dragging a small refrigerator around with you
(and without the benefits of quick access to a cold beer....)

The shoulder-based method of carrying gear has other downsides. First of all, if you're holding your scope dangling over one shoulder
you've lost the use of one hand. If your camera is slung over your other shoulder, then navigating rough or narrow trails
becomes a dangerous balancing act. Tilting one direction unbalances the other side. Stepping over obstacles becomes an unruly
game of Twister complete with contortions and unnatural moves as you try to keep all the gear secure and in place without losing your balance.
Add to that a slippery fabric like a rain coat or wind breaker and you have to start shrugging your shoulders and flexing like a
Yogi just to keep everything from falling off in a destructive and expensive clatter. And does your health insurance policy
cover the chiropractor who will inevitably become a regular necessity?

A BETTER WAY

Of course anyone who has ever done a few days of hiking knows the worst possible place to place the brunt of a load
is on your shoulders. All well-designed backpacks have a weight-bearing strap that fastens around your midsection, distributing the weight
more efficiently to your torso and keeping the load off your much less capable and pain-sensitive shoulders.

Scope and camera carrying backpacks are available. But what about the Josie-Wales factor? How fast can you get to your scope or camera if they're
packed away on your back?

MY OWN GEAR LIST

Here's the list of the gear I wanted to carry:

Binocs (my trusty Zeiss 10x42s)
Scope and tripod (Zeiss 85mm with Gitzo CF tripod)
Canon 40D DSLR with 300mm F4 and 1.5x TC
Canon A720 digiscoping camera with adapter
Sennheiser ME66/K6 shotgun mic
Edirol R-09HR digital recorder
iPod Nano
Radio Shack speaker
Laser pointer
GPS
Water
Bird book
Foul Weather protection: umbrella and poncho
Spare batteries and memory cards

This gear list may seem a bit extreme, but I use all of this often when I'm in the field, especially on a trip to some new country.

THE GEEKY PAIN-FREE SOLUTION

After years of pain, I decided it was finally time to find a good solution to this problem of how to carry my gear in the field, without losing fast access to it, and while keeping the load as comfortable as possible.

To find a solution I studied camera-carrying equipment, back packs, and also checked out modular military and law enforcement weight-bearing systems.

The basis of the carrying system I finally created to carry all this gear is not pretty.
It will not be something you would want to wear to a singles bar, or in any public arena not populated solely by avid birders.
However it does solve the problem of providing fast access to a lot of gear, distributing the load as painlessly as possible,
and it eliminates the constant vigilance needed when trying to keep shoulder straps from falling off.
Furthermore, it's a great exercise in overcoming the negative effects of pride....

The system is based around a waist belt and a shoulder harness. Most of the weight is taken by the belt itself and the
shoulder harness keeps everything stable and in place, without bearing much of the load. This is similar to the strategy
used by backpacks that allow hikers to carry very heavy loads for many days of hiking by keeping the load on the torso and not on the shoulders.
Both the belt and the harness also provide multiple attachment points for the smaller items like the iPod and recorder.

I found a few harness systems from military-gear suppliers like Blackhawk and the camera-gear suppliers like Lowepro.
I evaluated systems from both these companies and decided on using a hybrid Lowepro system.
The Blackhawk gear is very well made. However I found that there was only one attachment point on the harness, and it was positioned too high on the shoulder.

http://www.blackhawk.com/product/Load-Bearing-SuspendersHarness,37,2.htm

Blackhawk gear also looks very "military". In some countries it's important not to look like you're in some foreign army, so I went with the milder Lowepro camera look.

The belt I chose is the Lowepro Lightbelt

http://products.lowepro.com/product/S-F-Light-Belt,2027,31.htm

The harness is from the Lowepro Field and Street series
http://products.lowepro.com/product/S-F-Shoulder-Harness,2028,32.htm

The Field and Street belt designed for the harness is too wide for the camera-carrying system I describe below. And, although comfortable, it might have been a bit bulky and hot in the tropics.

To make the light belt attach to the F&S harness, I had to add a 2" wide webbing buckle I took from a briefcase strap.

ATTACHING THE SCOPE AND CAMERA

After choosing the belt and harness I had to find a way to attach my scope and tripod to the belt. That would distribute the weight and also eliminate the problem of the strap slipping off my shoulder. I wanted to be sure whatever attachment I used, it would allow for a fast way to attach and detach the scope.

I tried using just a carabiner on the belt, but because it could flop forwards and backwards, it was not always easy to attach or detach the scope clip. I probably could have found a way to stabilize it with tape or something else, however I decided to bolt a pipe U Bolt clamp onto the belt. This makes the attachment very easy and fast since the clamp is actually bolted onto the belt and doesn't move at all.

On the scope side I attached a strap to the top and bottom of the tripod's center post. By putting a knot in the middle I could find the right balance point so I can actually carry the scope with the legs out.

For the digiscoping camera I just attached a case to the tripod. This allows me to quickly get to the camera without even looking away from a bird. And the case hangs easily from the tripod when it is attached to the belt.

On the DLSR camera side, I tried a clamping systems similar to the one I used on the scope, but none worked that well due to the length of the lens
and the balance of the camera system.

At a recent photo show in NYC I found a company with the perfect solution, Think Tank. They make a pouch that is large
enough to hold the full 14" length of my lens, TC and hood, with the camera securely balanced at the top of the pouch.

The pouch attaches very firmly to the belt with large velcro flaps.
With the camera body so readily accessible, and the pouch large enough so that it doesn't offer much resistance, I can grab the camera and shoot
more quickly than I could even with a shoulder strap.

The product is the LC 75 Popdown.
http://www.thinktankphoto.com/ttp_product_LC75PpDwn.php

ATTACHING THE OTHER GEAR

With the camera and scope attachments worked out, I then easily figured out where to put all of the other gear.

The most difficult was the shotgun mic, which is fairly long. The Think Tank has a mesh pocket on the side. This works well for the mic unless it has a windscreen. The added bulk of the windscreen impinges on the inside of the pouch enough to make the camera a bit harder to pull out.

So I attached another, thin pouch, on the side of the Think Tank pouch.
The one I used happens to be one from a water carrying system by Platypus. Of course you could use any similar tubular pocket-like device. I put a cut-off vitamin bottle in the bottom to keep the pouch open enough to make it easy and fast to remove the mic. I also tied the bottom of the pouch down so that it wouldn't ride up when removing the mic.

For the binocs I'm just using an ordinary, traditional binocular harness system that takes the weight from the neck and distributes it across the back
and shoulders.

For the smaller electronic gear I used the harness attachment points. I attached the iPod and recorder to the left side. This put the recorder near the mic so I could use a short cable.

The speaker is on the right side and I connect all three devices using a "Y" cable. This allows me to record a bird and then play the song back instantly, while keeping the iPod online and ready to play at all times.

You can find info on how to wire this combination in my column on field recorders and shotgun mics:
http://www.surfbirds.com/blog/tomstips/5214/Tools+for+Attracting+the+Unknown...Field+Recorders+and+Shotgun+Mics.html

I attached the GPS to the belt and the laser pointer to the binoc strap along with a clip-on lens cloth.

I can attach a water bottle and small accessory pouch to the belt fairly easily.

For the bird book, I added an ordinary book bag. This is the only part of the system that is shoulder-based. You could easily use a belt-mounted book bag as well if you had one.

Finally, I added the smallest backpack I could find to carry my rain gear including an umbrella, rain coat along with some camera accessories.

For the complete system the order of putting on the gear is important. First on is the book bag, so that it doesn't interfere with the scope.
Next is the harness with all of its attachments. Then the binoculars. And finally the small backpack.

I'VE NOW BEEN PAIN FREE FOR 6 MONTHS...

Well there you have it. This gear will make you look like a Star-trek-show attending, Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing, card-carrying Geek.

But if you can put aside your pride and any concerns about looking normal, the system will allow you very fast access to all of your essential birding gear without the pain and suffering caused by traditional shoulder-based systems.

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