Wildlife Photography with the OM System 100 to 400 Lens and the PGYTECH Camera Strap Pro

Welcome to another trip to El Fondo Natural Park. As always, when I come here, there's a sense of anticipation to see what's new, what's changed, if there's any new wildlife around, anything different to see. And, well, you'll find out when I do. Hopefully we'll find some interesting bird images to shoot, and you never know, there might be some other stuff as well. I'm also gonna try, during the course of this video, to talk very briefly about this camera strap that I'm wearing, that I've been using now for a few outings. It's a PGY Tech, it's their Pro Strap, and it might be interesting for anybody that's looking for a strap to carry a camera for, you know, potentially long periods of time. I hope you'll enjoy the video. If you do, and you're new here, don't forget to hit subscribe before you go. Duck walking down the, walking down the footpath towards me here. How close are you gonna get? So close, I can't even shoot you. You're too close, I can't focus on you. Friendly duck. Well, quite a few ducks around, still a lot of northern shovelers around that were here last time I was here. Also seems to be a lot of photographers around. Normally you see one or two, but I've seen eight or nine other people with cameras and lenses and taking pictures of things. I'm going to head out to some of the other little locations here, because last time that's where I was rewarded with some unusual stuff. Whether I will be this time or not, of course, remains to be seen, but if we don't look, we don't know. I'm gonna go around to this little hide observation area. Last time I was here, which was about a month ago, there was a very rare white-headed duck way out in the distance. I got a picture of it, but it wasn't a great picture. I seriously doubt it will still be there, but you never know. It's worth going and having a look, keeping my eyes peeled and seeing if there's a, if it's still here and if it is, if there's a chance to get a better image of it. There is absolutely nothing in this bit, nothing at all. Okay, let's see what we can see from this hide over here. There's definitely some more life this side. Plenty of flamingos. Looks like there may be some other stuff as well, so worth hanging out here for a little while and seeing what we can see. Flamingo with some really nice colors, some quite vibrant colors. It's preening. There's a good chance it might flap its wings out at some point, so I'm gonna try and get it. There's another one a bit further out, but it's a bit too far away to get a decent shot. Fish in here coming up to the surface. That's different. Coming up and just breaking the surface. Whether I actually managed to get a decent shot, I don't know, but yeah, something different. Marsh harrier up there, I think. Swooping around and around. Beautiful. Just dropped down now behind the reed, so I can't see it anymore. Didn't think I was gonna see it this time. Okay, let's have a quick chat about this strap. So this is the PGY Tech Pro camera strap. As you can see, it's an over-the-shoulder strap rather than around your neck. The advantage of that, of course, is it doesn't put pressure on your neck and cause neck ache if you're carrying a heavy camera system. It's pretty lightweight, but nevertheless seems to be pretty robust. It's obviously like a webbing-type material, and the fittings on it are all plastic, or very heavy-duty plastic, which does feel pretty solid. The strap is adjustable in length, and you'd normally have it set up so that the camera, when you've got it sort of laying down, kind of sits just on the hip or just below the hip. It's a nice comfortable position for it. This one comes with a little underarm strap, and the idea behind that is that when you move the camera up and down, it stops the whole strap from moving. If you don't have one of these underarm straps, what can happen is the padded bit of the strap ends up sort of going down onto your back when you bring the camera up, or right down on the front when you bring it down. So this is really quite a useful thing. It doesn't have to be tight, just enough to stop the whole thing from moving. I have the strap connected onto the tripod plate on my lens, which for a long lens is a good way to do it, because it supports the lens rather than the camera, which is always a good way to avoid any, if you like, wear and tear on the lens mount. My little duck friend is still wandering around down here. The way this attaches, it comes with one of these plates, which is kind of an Arca Swiss plate. So you can use it on a tripod, but it also fits onto the PGY Tech kind of quick release mount that you can mount on a belt or a camera rucksack strap or something like that. And then you have these kind of cords here that loop through holes in this mount, and then they clip into this here. Now, I must admit, I was a bit skeptical at first about these little cords, because they don't look very thick. I have tested them extensively at home, both with a constant amount of weight applied to them and giving them some really good, hard, jerking tugs. And they are actually really, really strong. They do actually have a wear indicator built into them, so if you start to see yellow showing through, it means they're getting worn out and you should change them. The strap comes with two sets of these, so that's quite handy. What do you want, little duck? These little cords then clip into this mount here, so you can release them by pressing a button. Push this button in and pull the little bead out, which is fiddly to do when I'm trying to film it. And then you can quite easily take them both off. You can take the camera off of the strap, and then you can put it back on just by clicking it in. And again, these actually do seem to be very secure. You wouldn't release them by accident. Definitely wouldn't release two of them by accident. One, very, very unlikely. Two, not gonna happen. So it's a pretty secure system for mounting it, while still enabling a reasonably easy way to get the camera off of the strap if you want to. So normally the camera hangs down kind of at the hip level here. Now what you can do to stop it from swinging around if you're walking around, there's a little lock mechanism here. Push it in and it's locked, doesn't move. When you want to use the camera, you just press this little button here. That releases the lock and the camera is in free to slide up and down the strap to bring it up for use. Now I've used this strap on four or five occasions now, and I have to say I'm really impressed with it. It works really well, it's really comfortable, seems well made, and it's a pretty good price as well. I'll put a link to this in the video description if you want to have a look at it, and there's a discount code here to get you some money off if you decide you want to buy it. Now I should say, of course, I am using this with a lightweight system, Micro Four Thirds, and I use it because it's lightweight. What it would be like with a full frame, maybe a DSLR and maybe one of those great big 600 mil lenses, I don't know. But I should imagine it would still be pretty comfortable. And of course, I do also have to just be completely honest and say I didn't pay for this. When PGY Tech sent me the rope strap bag to review, which I did, I don't know, a few weeks back, I'll stick a link to that up there now if you haven't seen it, they sent me this as an extra, and I just haven't got around to reviewing it yet. So today I am. It's a rabbit right out on the far bank over there, but there's too much grass around the thing to get a shot of it. It might work. Quickly change my subject detection. Okay, that's it for me today. Time to head for home. A quick thank you to PGY Tech for sending me this strap. And of course, an even bigger thank you to you guys for watching this video. If you've enjoyed it, please give it a like. If you've enjoyed it and you're new here, please give it a like and hit subscribe before you go. And that's it. Thank you very much for watching. And until the next one, bye.