And, after its first real ride, I can declare the Outer Shell camera strap to be a win. 20 miles, 1500 feet of climbing in the Oakland hills, with the SRT Super that started this thread snugged against the small of my back, on the right side. (Crossdraw strap coming up from under left arm to leftside breastbone.) The Minolta is a significant chunk o' metal... quite a bit heavier than I remember my X-700 as being. In the whole ride, the rig didn't move: bounce, slide, rotate, slip down... none of it. The only way I could tell I'd been wearing it was some soreness in my shoulder/neck junction... which is wonky anyway, and has been for 2+ decades, plus the new bar position and this being the hardest road ride I've done in years... not surprising that my shoulder's a little mad at me.

As to the photographing itself, it was fun. Mid-day, and sunny, so I had to find interesting shadows and other not-boring ways to take pictures of what was, after all, a very, very pretty East Bay ride. Burned up the last 20-ish frames of the Tri-X, and I hadn't brought more. Fortunately, the last few shots corresponded to the like 2nd-to-last place I wanted to take pictures, so it almost worked out. (Not to mention, I'd never changed film in this camera before, and not in any camera since 2014. Having my 1st time be in the field ain't a great idea anyway.)

Almost all of my old manual-SLR muscle memory is long-since forgotten, so there was a bit of a comedic aspect to the whole thing. I didn't quite manage to take a macro image of the backside of my lens cap, but there were multiple no-winds, several lens-cap-still-ons that fell short of me snapping the picture, including one that was saved only because I'd also forgotten to crank the advance. Add in the totally-unfamiliar strap system, and there was much fumbling, and some cursing.

Since I'm burning a roll each of Tri-X, HP5+, and FP4+, I decided to swap in the HP5. Tri-X is the only black & white film I've ever shot, and not much of that, so I decided that sticking with another roll of 400 would maybe flatten the (re-)learning curve a bit. We'll see.

So, tl;dr, bottom line, dead-and-buried lede:

The Outer Shell camera strap is a great product made by great people, and if you want something that does what it does, you should buy this one from them, 'cuz it's rad and they're rad.

--Shannon