When walking through the old city of Elburg, in the Netherlands, earlier this year, a wedding was about to start. I loved the look of the flowers on this black VW Beetle that was parked outside the town hall, so I took a couple of shots with my 10-22mm lens.

Wedding Beetle

Elburg, Gelderland, The Netherlands

Wedding Beetle

Elburg, Gelderland, The Netherlands

A different kind of Dutch windmill to the last one I posted. This one was shot in central Holland somewhere, while cruising through the canals in a boat.

Dutch windmill in the fields

The Netherlands

Here is a photo from a wedding I shot earlier this month. This was a spur-of-the-moment shot, taken out the window of my parked car with a 70-200mm lens, as the wedding cars were driving through a carpark towards me.

wedding car in black and white

Pioneer Village, Armadale, Western Australia

I have been using a DIY wrist strap on my camera for the last couple of months, and I am finding that it works very well for me. When on a photowalk or a photo shoot, I wasn't using the camera's neck strap, and typically just would let it hang down, getting in the way.

This wrist strap allows me to completely remove the neck strap, provides some security against dropping the camera, and adds some wrist support when holding the camera up to my eye.

I have used it on a couple of photo shoots and a photowalk, and am not missing the neck strap at all.

The problem with many of the commercial hand/wrist straps is that the top normally attaches to the strap mount, while the bottom attaches to the tripod mount underneath the camera. Because I don't use a battery grip, such a strap would be too small for my large hands, and it could potentially foul the tripod mount.

This DIY camera wrist strap only attaches to the top strap mount on the camera body, and is adjustable to fit any size wrist and hand. It allows me to leave my tripod quick-release plate screwed onto the base of the camera body, and I can clip the camera onto my home-made rapid strap without having to remove the wrist strap from the camera.



I first saw this DIY camera wrist strap here on Jan Christian's blog. While Jan used red paracord for his strap (which works well with the red strip on some Canon L lenses), I decided to use a more subtle black paracord for my wrist strap.



Jan specifies 550lb 7-core paracord, which can easily be sourced on eBay or elsewhere on the internet. The ends of an appropriate length of paracord (approx 60-70cm) are tied with a lanyard knot.

The strap is then looped through the top right strap mount on the camera body using a simple lark's head knot. As it will probably be a tight fit through the strap mount on the camera, use one of the inner strands of paracord to help pull it through.

pull the strap through the strap mount

lark's head knot on the camera

The length of the strap can then be adjusted to suit your wrist size by moving the lanyard knot. As Jan says, you need to adjust it to find the "sweet spot where there's a little tension on the strap but enough slack so that you can still manipulate the buttons on the camera".

Once suitably adjusted, cut any excess off the ends, and melt them to prevent fraying. If necessary, the strap can easily be removed from your camera at any time, without having to undo the lanyard knot.

the finished product

using the strap

If any locals who know me personally are interested in trying one of these wrist straps, I have plenty of black paracord, as 30 metres was the shortest length I could find on eBay at the time!