COOPH Photo Glove Ultimate at a glance:
- Website: store.cooph.com
- Price: £199
Cooperative of Photography (COOPH) is an Austrian company that specialises in high-end apparel for photographers. Its extensive range of jackets, shirts, T-shirts, hoodies, headwear and gloves includes this rather clever Photo Glove Ultimate – the company’s ‘ultimate’ hand-protectors, sized S-XXL, in ladies’ and men’s styles, that come in black, dark brown and light brown.
Photo Glove Ultimate is a kind of hybrid between a mitt and a glove. When zipped up, it functions as a leather mitt – warm, but not great for pushing small buttons. However, unzip the mitts and push them back (magnets hold the thumb part and the fingers part of the mitt in place) and your fingers, encased in their lightweight inner ‘gloves’, are ready to operate a camera.
The finger-hugging internal gloves feature silicone aperture diaphragm motifs for grip, and each thumb and index finger has a nylon-like material on it that allows the user to handle a touchscreen.
The inner gloves are made with Primaloft insulation, so your hands will stay warm while the mitts are pulled back. However, there’s better protection with the outer mitts, constructed from a durable lambskin leather – soft to the touch and not as stiff as cow hide. An adjustable cuff helps insulate the wearer, too.
When the mitt is done up it is hard to undo. I had to use my teeth to unzip the first one, which then freed up my hand to unzip the other.
However, although the Photo Glove Ultimate has many excellent features overall – it is stylish and warm, well made and durable, and the sneaky inner gloves give you the manoeuvrability you need to operate a camera’s small buttons – it is also very expensive. Still, if you are trekking up mountains on a cold night, or planning a trip to Iceland and you’d like to do so in style, this might just be for you.
The leather ‘mitt’ folds back to expose inner smartgloves
