How To Tie A Slip Not With Black Rapid

Born to Pun...the curse of Stephan Pastis and me...and every other advertising or copy writer in the world. If you are not familiar with the comic strip " Pearls Before Swine" by Pastis I advise you to google it for a couple of weeks until one of the pun strips comes by. It will be worth it.

Back to the Black Rapid. On a call into the shop I noticed that they have made a new shoulder pad for some of their straps and the thing is a beauty.

Prior to this, some of these iconic straps were made with shoulder pads that slipped fore and aft on the straps. This was fine for positioning the strap and the camera on the other end of it, but the characteristic sliding action of the Black Rapid system sometimes resulted in that shoulder pad crawling down the front or back of your shirt. This was particularly troublesome if you were wearing a shiny polyester shirt or a nylon rain jacket.

Black Rapid makes some of their straps with an ancillary lock strap that runs under the armpit and that deals with the problem., but at the cost of another operation to get in or out of it. Now they have a better solution.

Look at that pad - it is made of a soft live rubber with a very flexible shape, plenty of thickness, and gripping patterns on either side. It hits your shoulder and stays there - even when you slide the camera up and down continuously to your eye. And mark this; if you have to put another pack or strap over the top of this, it also benefits from not being as likely to slip off the shoulder.

Ergonomics in photographic equipment need not evoke an " Erg...". This is design done right.