More seemingly benign equipment problems

So the other piece of photo equipment I wanted to write about is not technologically oriented at all. In fact, it's an old style piece of completely non-technical equipment.

We use a bracket whith each camera, which is a piece of metal which attaches along the bottom of the camera, then runs a few inches beyond the end and has a piece that allows you to mount a flash on it, so the flash comes up above the camera. If you can't picture it, don't worry. The setup isn't so important to my story.

So this bracket attaches to the camera with a screw which screws into a hole built into the bottom of nearly all cameras - or at least professional and semi-professional ones (your point and shoot might not have, but all higher end ones do). So the screw usually has a large plate on the bottom which is slightly larger than the size of the bracket and allows you to twist the screw to tighten the camera to the bracket (see photos).




Somehow, one of the brackets I was sent had a screw that did not extend over the sides of the bracket, which made it very difficult to twist. Then, it was octagonal, not the usual round shape, which meant it had nice sharp pointy corners, which made it painful to try and twist it.

The point of these screws is to tighten the camera on so that when you hold it up with the flash, everything stays together in the configuration you've placed it. I couldn't tighten the screw enough so everything went flopping forward when I picked it up.

Luckily they sent me a new one before my next shoot. Not so useful the way it was.