“Here is the first thing you should buy when getting a new sony Camera”

Many of us have our little rituals and must-haves we must buy when we get a new camera. For me, it’s usually some form a cage these days that I can bolt all my other doohickies to, but for Justin “Dunna” McDonough, it’s the humble L bracket. After recently picking up the new Sony A6600, he put together this little video to explain why.

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L brackets can make your life so much easier, especially if you have one for each camera you own. As Justin says in the video, regular tripod plates, especially the teeny tiny ones most tripods use these days, are a pain. And you generally don’t want to have your tripod head tilted sideways for vertically oriented shots if you don’t have to. But with an L bracket permanently attached to your camera, you don’t have to, and it eliminates the tiny fiddly plate.

In this case, Justin picked up the SmallRig L bracket for the Sony A6600, which is specifically designed to cover the entire base of the camera while still allowing you access to your battery slot and ports. L brackets designed specifically for small cameras like this can also help to bulk things up a little and improve handholding and ergonomics because you’ve got a little more to hold onto.

But it still offers the main purpose of L brackets, and that’s to add Arca Swiss compatible tripod plates on the bottom and to the side of your camera, allowing you to quickly and easily orient the camera either horizontally or vertically without having to deal with fiddly little plates or tilting your head off to the side and re-levelling it.

Justin also got the Cold Shot Relocation Plate for the A6600 as well, so that when he’s vlogging with it or making any videos where he needs to speak to camera, he can mount a little light or microphone on top of the camera without it hindering the view of the flip-up LCD. But you could also mount one to the L bracket, too.

You can never have too many mounting options, especially when it comes to shooting video.

What’s your must-have item when you get a new camera?