Become Better Photographer: L Brackets with David Bergman

David suggests: “If you shoot landscapes, portraits, macro images, or anything else where you might be on a tripod.. then you’ve dealt with this issue. Shooting horizontally in the landscape position is easy, you can mount onto a tripod or a ball head, and everything is solid and stable, but what if you want to shoot vertically in the portrait position? With most tripods alone, it’s just not possible to turn the camera that way. You can do it with a ball head, by swinging the camera around and down the side, but that brings a couple of problems with it.”

“First… it changes your composition. You’re physically moving the lens over and down. So you’ll probably need to recompose your shot. If you’re a landscape photographer who’s been waiting all day for the last five minutes of golden hour, and the last thing you want to do is spend a couple of those minutes moving and lowering your tripod.”

“Secondly… with a heavy camera hanging over the side like that, it’s really unstable.  The center of gravity is pulling your tripod over and the ball head will probably slip overtime, no matter how much you tighten it. If you’re doing really long exposures, it’ll be very tough to get tack sharp images.”

Thankfully, there is a solution. Pick yourself up an L bracket. Sometimes also called an L plate.

“What you do is attach this thing to your camera and leave it there. It gives you a standard  attachment on both the bottom, and side of your camera. Now to switch to the vertical position you simply flip your camera, and reattach on the side.

The lens is roughly in the same spot, so you don’t have to recompose and the weight of the camera is centered over the tripod, so stability is a non-issue.

Now when buying one, make sure you get a metal bracket because the plastic ones can break too easily, as you clamp down on it.

Also it’s better to get one specifically made for your camera, so that it has cutouts in all the right places, and won’t block your ports or your battery cover.

“If you’re a tripod shooter, the little bit of added weight is absolutely worth the benefits of attaching an L bracket to your camera. They’re not that expensive, and once you start using one, you’ll wonder how you lived without it. “