I loath to admit it, for a product I’ve championed for quite sometime, I’ve been doing so largely without any field experience. In fact, the truth is, I just got my ThinkTank Camera strap and camera support straps. And I’ve only just begun to get them squared away. So far, I’m pretty confident that I was right.

My first thoughts on the system is that it’s everything it’s cracked up to be. With the limited shoulder time I’ve given it, the strap, while narrow (1in.), is pretty comfortable on it’s own. More importantly though, it has grippy rubber on both sides; regardless of which way it ends up landing on your shoulder, it’s not going to slide easily. The grippy rubber seems to work fairly well, at least on the few cotton shirts I’ve tried it with, though time will tell with that. Grippyness wise, it seems to hold better than my Lowepro straps did but not quite as good as the wider grippier Canon OEM straps.

However, the real win is when paired with the camera support straps. Clip the metal rings (at the right of the above picture) into the hooks (left in the above picture) and no more sore necks/shoulders from heavy cameras and unpadded straps

I’ve got a couple of long days of shooting coming up, where I’ll be putting the straps and support straps though their paces, but from what I’ve been able to tell so far, I think they’re the winner I thought they’d be. I think at that point I’ll be able to put up a more detailed review. The real test will be this bird season and with a bigger (100-400 f/4) lens to see how they really stand up to carrying weight comfortably.