This guy is carrying two cameras – can you tell?

Aha. Check that out!

Where the straps cross in the back, four snap fasteners are attached at the corners of the junction.

Full R-Strap functionality is maintained

Look, Ma, my shirt doesn’t wrinkle!

Let’s put the T-Strap together, shall we?

Separate your two R-Straps so that they each form a straight line. Use the slide-lock to constrain the sliding eyehook connector close to the padded part of the strap, we want it out of our way for now.

Loop the strap from the first R-Strap into the padded portion of the other. Do not loop or twist the strap.

Now loop the strap from the second R-Strap into the padded portion of the first, twisting the strap once.

When you cross the rear part of padded portions over each other, your assembly should look like this.

To hold the two R-Straps together, I sewed on snap fasteners at the four outer corners of the junction. I want the two straps to not be permanently joined and I wanted the adjustability of the straps preserved. Behold my awesome sewing ability!

Once connected, your strap should hang like this:

I’ve got one thing to fine-tune and that’s optionally attaching the bottom points of the straps (just behind where the camera hangs) to my belt. It doesn’t feel completely necessary as the inter-looping of the straps keeps one side supported when the opposite is lifted but it feels better having them attached – just like a gun holster.

How can we (or Blackrapid?) improve this idea? Using two individual straps is great and since they’re detachable, we can still use them one at a time when appropriate. But the double layer of padding at the crossover point in the back is unnecessary for a purpose-built dual strap. I’d like to see a specially designed “X” pad arrangement to reduce the bulk of the padding. The low point/belt connection is also important – getting the strap to lay against the body in the optimal position may require some adjustments.

Check out my search for the best two-camera strap in Part I.

Before we go into what makes the best two-camera strap setup, let’s just talk about what makes a good strap and the ones that meet my goals.

• OEM Camera Strap – I find the Canon strap to be unusable. I like black straps with no markings. The canon strap is narrow, stiff and uncomfortable. Not even an option.
• Optech Super Classic – My normal shoulder strap of choice. Great for neck or shoulder wear. Good padding, comfortable and that great stretchiness.
• UpStrap -Recommended often by others primarily for its grip on clothing. I’ve never tried it.
• R-Strap – My new favorite strap is the Blackrapid R-Strap. The R-Strap differs from a typical shoulder strap in that it is not mounted to two strap points on the camera, but instead to the tripod base of the body (or lens tripod mount for long lenses.) with a swiveling connection. This connector slides up and down the front of the strap as you raise the camera to shoot. I have seen a similar idea in the wild called the Y-Strap. I really like the hardware and materials used in the R-Strap, and while I would like to see a moderately lower price on it, I feel it was worth the price paid.

NOTE: When using a normal shoulder strap, I had the best luck mounting both ends of the strap to the grip side of the camera. With a gripped-XXD body or a 1 Series, there is a strap mount point on the bottom of the grip on the shutter side. Using that point and the top shutter-side mounting location (instead of the opposite upper point) lets the camera hang more comfortably at your side, but not as advantageous as for neck wear. When I showed this to my Nikon-shooting friend Jamie, she was very excited until she discovered that her Nikons (which includes a D3) have no bottom-grip mounting point. Haha.So now we want to find a way to put two straps together to carry two cameras. These are the methods I have come across so far.

• Two Shoulder Straps – An easy, and often default, two-camera setup is using two typical shoulder straps. Carry one on each shoulder is fine, but only in the most basic sense. Once movement is involved, like crouching or turning, the cameras become dangerous wrecking balls, or fall off your shoulder. Some people wear one on the neck and one over the shoulder. I don’t like a neck strap at all, and a camera hanging there would just bang into my shoulder-side camera too often. I’m already a klutz. You can criss-cross them over opposite shoulders, which will carry better, but pulling a camera up to shoot is impossible without its strap moving too.
• The Reporter - Carrying two cameras in the front might work for two P&S cameras, or a camera and some binoculars, but I’m trying to carry two gripped bodies with lens and flash. Impossible.
• Two-strap harness – So there’s got to be a way of using two shoulder straps effectively, right? ChrisDM in the Fred Miranda forum has probably carried this method to it’s best conclusion. I’ve tried something similar with my Optech straps (as well as un-strechy straps) and various mounting and suspension points. Ultimately, the main problem is that the shoulder straps can still fall off your shoulders and the weight distribution is sub-optimal. There is no stealth in this arrangement either, and I would knock the cameras together too much.
• Two R-Straps then – Ok, well let’s put two R-Straps together then, instead of two shoulder straps. This works pretty well. I’ve tried this with four or five weddings and it’s the closet I’ve gotten to my goals thus far. The downside of this method is where the two straps cross in the front. Not only is it bulky, but it constantly bunches up my shirt, including the collar. I have to constantly pull my shirt from underneath this junction, and it looks a bit ugly too.

So I’ve been staring at my R-Straps and thinking about gun holsters (the under-jacket ones, with a clip holder on one side) and how they go over and under the shoulders, joined in the back (and at the belt on each side). Searching the internet for inspiration, I found this post at photo.net. There has to be a way to make this work with my two R-Straps and I think I finally found it. Stay tuned for Part II, The T-Strap.

And now, Part II, The T-Strap

My idea is thus: I will pay my children to pack and ship certain orders for me. I will pay them  the profit on each order they ship (eventually, they’ll learn how to maximize their earnings). They also have to have the urgency to ensure that all orders ship within 48 hours, that will be the harder part to sell them.

What I’m hoping is that the scope of this idea will make it very exciting to them. Why not let them particpate in the success of the family?

The exercise we went through over dinner was to create tiers of pricing based on distinct changes in client usage volume. We then identified the nature of the usage increases for each tier. The more product an individual retail store sells, the more usage they would have on our system. We also know that the distribution center supporting that retail store will have an increase in usage due to those sales. It’s not just the sale that cost us money, but the entire life cycle of the product in our user’s supply chain. The cost of our product is time spent developing and operating a business-critical enterprise application. Parts and Labor.

We can distill our entire offering down to the cost of supporting a single piece of inventory, from acquisition, to management then sale. Our ongoing invesment in developing and operating the application is our labor cost. Our parts are the items we must buy to provide service to our customers: hardware, colo-space and bandwidth. If we know how these costs scale with usage, we can predict a total cost for providing our service at any level of volume – a de-facto unit price.

We defined an “inventory transaction” as the movement of one piece of product into or out of a managed-inventory location. When a sale occurs at a retail store, that’s “out” movement. When the store stocks their shelves, that’s an “in” movement. Back at the warehouse, the reciept and inventorying of large shipments is “in”, shipping wholesale orders is “out”. Each of these operations has the same unit-cost of service for us. For the increased prices between tiers to have value to the customer, we created a “quantity discount” for higher levels of usage.

Pricing should be simple AND fair. So we need to take our complicated measurements and quantize them to just a few distinct tiers. We’ll call them low-volume, mid-volume and high-volume. Next, we’ll refine our tiers by profiling the different types of usage for each.

But how could we possibly realize such a dream? The answer is among us my friends, each and every one of us. For any problem is solved by simply dividing it into pieces. Imagine if all the wizards and electronic artisans of the world each conspired to solve a piece of this puzzle? One team tackles chairs, another media server containment and/or display, another team for the media server. We’d get breakthroughs in displays and control surfaces. New designs in desks, workspaces and storage. Lighting, sound, everything…

Now, the idea here is that every contribution to the project shares in the benefit of the project. The richest geeks must pledge to buy the first units. This funds the next level of the project, where the money is reinvested in manfacturing in order to lower the cost of the units. Now, the next richest geeks buy that round of “ulitmate offices”. Reinvest those moneys into manufacturing and lower the price again. Then, we can all have the incredible workspace we’ve dreamed of…Yay!