I just received my new Really Right Stuff WPF-QR flash bracket. It is a truly extraodinary piece of engineering and I'm glad I spent the money.
However, I do have a concern and wondered if any here have noticed the same. When using the bracket in horizontal mode, I find that the lower fourth of the photo is not being lit quite as fully as the rest of the pic. I tried adjusting the flash head to the negative (beyond 90 degrees) downward mark on the 580 ex II. This helped a little, but not completely.
When you move the flash up using any bracket, you risk loosing coverage of your subject, but it will depend on how far your subject is away from the flash. For distant subjects, your coverage will basically be normal, but for very close subjects, you may loose a lot of coverage. Unlike the older Really Right Stuff flash brackets, the WPF-QR does not have an adjustable feature that allows you to point the whole flash downward, so you are kind of stuck with the straight ahead pointing of the flash.
For close subjects, you can try setting the beam angle on the flash to a wider setting than the lens would automatically select. Because the subject is close, the loss of flash intensity from the extra wide beam will likely not be an issue. Adding some sort of diffuser to your flash for close shots could also work to increase the flash coverage.
For a lot of flash work, I add one of the models of the Demb Flip-It, which provides an adjustable reflective surface that gives results similar to a small diffuser, plus it is adjustable so that you could bring diffused coverage in for close subjects, and at the same time get the benifits of a larger light source size.
Thank you for the information Roland. Very valid points made here. I was close (less than 15 feet) from my subject. I will keep that in mind and practice some more.
I have the same bracket and love it. You'll find on your 580 flash, the head will click down one notch. It's not much but will help. For really close work, it won't be enough though.
15 feet doesn't sound like a bracket problem. Could the flash have been set manually to a narrower angle than the focal length? Could you have exceeded the X-sync speed of the flash?
Bearmann wrote:
15 feet doesn't sound like a bracket problem. Could the flash have been set manually to a narrower angle than the focal length? Could you have exceeded the X-sync speed of the flash?
I checked those things as I've done both before, but that wasn't the case. I was well within the sync speed.
I did try moving the bracket further down on the L-bracket. By doing that, I was able to attain a much better result. The only problem with that is that when I go from horizontal to vertical, I'm going to have to adjust the placement of the bracket each time.
How are you triggering the flash? Corded or IR or radio control? The sync speed is lower with the latter two options.
How much higher is the flash on the bracket compared to where it is on the hotshoe? If it's 12 inches higher, for example, than only the bottom 12 inches of the photo should be underexposed.
I'm not sure which bracket that is, but there can be a small change in the area covered if the flash head is in a different orientation than the camera, for example, camera and sensor oriented vertically, but flash head oriented horizontally. In most cases though, it's not significant.
One thing your missing is that if you move the head of the canon flash down one notch...you now set the flash to "wide angle" or "macro" (to some) lens setting...so the flash power will be weaker...thus less coverage than if you left it straight forward and manually set the focal length to 50 (best coverage on close shot)
