Recommended Travel Friendly Macro Tripod

Now that you know about L-brackets, and how they work,,,let's go forward with an attempt at visualization of the final set-up, with the camera ultimately positioned upright on the inverted column.

1. Starting out with just the ballhead hanging upside-down on the inverted column,,, tilt the ballheads' mounting plate by positioning it in the 90-degree portrait-mode notch of the ball-head, and lock it in place. For the sake of orientation, let's position the notch on the right-hand side of the column. The ballhead's top-plate is now oriented "up/down".

2. Now,,With the L-bracket mounted on the camera,,, and you looking at the back of the camera,,,attach the left side of the camera to the ball-heads' top-plate.

That's basically it.

It helps postioning the ballheads' drop-notch to the right of the inverted column,,, and,,, it also helps if you have a panning base on your ball-heads' body.

The panning base will also allow you to rotate/scan/sweep left/right to frame your shot,,, and/or clear the legs from your line of sight,

You should be able to mount the camera in either portrait-mode and/or landscape mode, and still have ready access to all the cameras' controls, with full visibility of your cameras' LCD screen,,,buttons, dials, etc.

Some issues that may arise are; the tripod column is too short to allow you to get lower;,,,,, simply adjust the tripods' leg lengths Another option would be to splay the tripods' legs farther apart, which would give you more leg-clearance as you pan..

There's also a completely different set-up for shooting right-side-up from between the tripods legs, and turning the tripod and head into a suspended/hanging gimbal-head,,,, but that requires a footed telephoto lens with a rotating collar, and positioning the lens-foot atop the lens (rather than under the lens). Basically, it's the same set-up as above,,,, inverted column and ball-head, but no need for the drop-notch,, Connect the lens-foot to the ballhead,,, and you're done,

Since all the weight of the camera and lens are "hanging" from the lens-foot,,, the camera can't flop side-to-side like it would if the ballhead was mounted above the apex. You can pan freely. The limitation will be the legs limiting how far you can pan,,, and the length of your cameras' lens possibly bumping into the legs.