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The L-Plate Advantage
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Without an L-plate, you must flop the head into the drop notch. Note how the load is lower and off-center.
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| With an L-plate, your load stays perfectly centered over the tripod. This improves stability and reduces the need to recompose. |
If you shoot with shorter, non-collared lenses, consider an L-plate to solve these shortcomings:
No Need to Recompose:
Without an L-plate, flopping the head over into the drop notch to go vertical is a royal pain; you’ll have to recompose from scratch. When “flopped”, the camera body is laterally displaced, and also dropped by ≈ 2/3rds of a foot, so you’ll often need to extend the tripod legs (or elevate a center column) to compensate for the new position. And, if you don’t like what you see, you’ll then have to “back out” all of those adjustments in order to recapture the initial view.
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| Switching from landscape to portrait is a snap! Just remove the camera and re-mount. |
Keep the Load Centered:
Sure, it can be inefficient to resort to the drop notch for vertical aspect—but there’s another penalty beyond mere inconvenience. Optimum vibration damping of the entire support system is assured when there is effective mass coupling between the load-head-legs-ground. When the load is directly atop the apex of the support structure, good mass coupling is assured. However, when the load is flopped off to the side, cantilevered out in space, effective mass coupling is not provided—so internal and external vibrations are likely to propagate, and blur potential resolution.
Using a conformal L-plate on the camera body solves both of the shortcomings that arise when composing in vertical aspect with short (non-collared) lenses. Now you can quickly mount the camera in horizontal or vertical aspect—directly atop the tripod’s apex—avoid gross positioning shifts—and retain best vibration damping.
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Nikon D200 camera fitted with BD200-L plate mounted on a Really Right Stuff BH-25 Pro ballhead and Gitzo GT0530 tripod.
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Travel Tip:
Flyweight legs with a light ballhead (such as our BH-25 Pro on Gitzo GT0530 or GT1530 legs) can be a great travel setup. Enhance the stability and keep the load straight up (directly over the center of gravity) by using an L-plate on your camera.
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