The Arca-Swiss B1 Monoball head
by Ed Alban

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ONE "L" OF A BRACKET

An "L" bracket allows you to switch the camera from horizontal into vertical position without tilting the ballhead.  It is an L-shaped piece of metal which has body plates that will slide into the head’s quick-release (QR) clamp on both of its horizontal and vertical arms.  Simply slide the bracket into the clamp using either of the two plates to achieve the orientation you need.

Kirk's BL-F5 "L" bracket for Nikon F5

If you have multiple bodies and you see yourself using an L-bracket on all of them, it makes more economic sense to buy a generic L-bracket, one that will fit any camera body and that will fit on your Arca-style QR clamp.

If you have only one camera body, you are then better off getting an L-bracket made specifically for that body, since the benefits are many. They're lighter, and fit more snugly to the contours of the camera. You are also 100% sure no feature of your camera will be compromised by the L-structure.  Kirk Enterprises and Really Right Stuff manufacture L-brackets for most late-model Nikon cameras.

Of course, if Kirk or RRS does not make a custom L-bracket for your camera (such as for my F4 and FM2), a generic L-bracket from these two companies would be the solution.  Here are the differences between these "generic" L-brackets:

The RRS generic version is the B16 converter clamp:
-	heavier at 14 oz	.
-	milled from a single piece of aluminum	.
-	comes with its own QR clamp. You attach your camera’s QR body plate onto the QR clamp on the L-bracket as you would on the ballhead’s QR clamp, making it very convenient to attach and detach from the camera	...
-	the L-bracket slides into the QR clamp back-to-front (i.e. parallel to lens axis).

This has one big advantage in that if you're working with macro, this orientation can serve as a "coarse" focusing stage. This is the reason why the RRS version is called a "converter" because it changes the orientation of the plates.