What to Get the Camera Owner Who Has Everything

Holiday Gifts

The best holiday gifts are those that you’ve obviously put a lot of thought into. But these days, who has time to think? In these frantic times, it’s better to outsource much of the mental heavy lifting to the Internet. So if you’ve been pondering how to equip that photo buff on your holiday shopping list, kindly dim those brain cells and read on.

Cleaners. Keeping the lens, sensor and camera itself clean isn’t a sign of obsessive compulsive disorder (well, maybe a little), but the hallmark of a savvy photographer. Minute specs of dust on your image sensor or slight smudges on the lens can mean the death of a great photograph. A cleaning kit will bundle all your photo buff needs to keep their gear – and their photos – spotless. The Lens Pen ProPak 1 ($34) includes a lens cleaning pen with a carbon compound for removing blemishes from lenses and sensors (can also be used on cell phone screens as well).

Tripod: Nature photographers, budding portrait artists or even the world traveler can appreciate a sturdy tripod. Even though camera lenses have made great strides in image stabilization, there are some cases when nothing but a tripod will do. Manfrotto’s Attitude tripod starts at a collapsed length of 20.28 inches and extends to a full 64.76 inches. It can mount cameras or video cameras as heavy as 7.7lbs  – encompassing just about any digital SLR/lens combo that a typical consumer would wish to mount. The tripod itself weights 3.8lbs, so it can sit relatively unobtrusively in a camera back pack.

If you’re on a tighter budget or know your photo hobbyist is on the adventurous side, why not spring for Joby’s GorrilaPod ($19). This flexible stabilizer can be mounted just about anywhere and supports cameras up to 11.5 oz in weight. The GorillaPod line extends to heavier d-SLRs as well, including a model that supports professional cameras/camcorders up to 11lbs.

Digital frames: There’s no point in taking masterful photos if no one can see them. A digital frame is much more than a showcase . Panasonic’s MW-20 ($249) combines a 9-inch with an iPod/iPhone dock and stereo speakers. You can display photos and videos from your connected iPod/iPhone while its battery charges in the dock, or use the frame’s 2GB of internal memory and an SD card slot to transfer and display images. A built-in luminance sensor can adjust the frame’s brightness based on ambient lighting – or shut the frame down completely when the room goes dark. If you own a Panasonic camera it can group your photos in the frame by the scene mode they were recorded in, which helps you organize your image collection on the frame’s memory.

If you’re the mobile type, consider Digital Foci’s 8-inch Photo Book. The product encases an 8-inch, 800 x 600 resolution LCD display inside a soft, “leather-like” case which you can bring with you to the grandparents. It offers a 2.5-hour battery, 4GB of internal memory and slots for all of the popular memory card formats. For d-SLR owners, the frame displays RAW image files in addition to your usual JPEG images, several video and digital music file formats too. It retails for $189.

Editing Software: Your average out-of-the-box photo software is good for the basics – emailing, organizing and light editing – but it can’t compare to a more advanced editor you have to pay a few bucks for. Photoshop Elements  is more than a few bucks ($99 of them, actually) but packs plenty of functionality in this its ninth version. You can share images to Facebook direct from your organizer, merge images together for large panoramas or add image effects. It’s packed with plenty of on-screen tutorials to help guide you through some of its more advanced functions.

Long Term Protection: It may not occur to you, or your photo hobbyist, that images stored on computer hard drives are supremely vulnerable to crashes and calamities. Everyone values their images, but few people know how to fully secure their digital memories. The folks at Swiss Picture Bank know how, through safe, online storage. (The Swiss, remember, know a thing or two about keeping things secure – why else do international criminal syndicates and hedge fund trillionaires stuff their cash into Swiss Banks?) At the (virtual) Swiss Picture Bank, you can prepay for storage allotments that cost roughly $20 per gigabyte but gets cheaper the more storage you buy. There’s no subscriptions to worry about – it’s buy once and you’re done, although you can add more storage allotments as you need them.
Once your images are on the Swiss Picture Bank servers they’re accessible via any Internet browser, you can download the full resolution files at any time free of charge, you can even order prints and photo gifts too. If you’re the environmental type, you can rest easy knowing the mindful Europeans have devised a solution which they claim runs on 98 percent carbon free energy.

Happy hunting for the perfect photography gifts.