Christmas is rapidly approaching, and if you’re like me, you’re starting to freak a bit at how little time is left before it hits. In the spirit of “hey, maybe this will help”, I thought I’d talk about a few things you might consider if you have no idea what to buy for that someone.
Gift Certificates
Some people (especially us old farts) grew up thinking that giving cash was impersonal or thoughtless. Then you spend enough time either returning and exchanging or trying to keep track of who gave what when so when you regift it, it doesn’t go back to the original gifted — and you get over it.
I’m at the point in my life where I don’t want more clutter in my house, I have pretty much all of the things in my life I need, and what I don’t have is so expensive or so hard to explain that they aren’t candidates for gifts (then again, I do, as usual, need slippers. just saying).
So I’ve come to terms with gift cards. And if you give an Amazon gift card, it can be turned into whatever the person wants, as long as it’s not illegal. It’s not impersonal — really — as much as it’s letting someone actually get what they want, not what you want to give them. Which surprisingly enough, aren’t always the same.
Another option if the person is a photographer is to get them a gift certificate from a rental shop like Borrowlenses — give them a chance to experiment with camera gear they don’t have and can’t afford.
Here’s one other idea for an intrepid photographer: help pay for a trip to go shoot photos. Sometimes, the best gift in the world is a motel room somewhere with a camera and no other responsibilities.
The Written Word
Need to find something for a reader? Here are a few titles I’ve read this year that you may find worth gifting:
With the movie of the Hobbit looming, many of us are ritually re-reading Tolkien once again. If you have a lover of Lord of the Rings that wants to dig deeper, then think about giving them a copy of Deconstructing Tolkien. In it Ed McFadden looks into the meaning behind the words and talks about the symbolism and ideas that make Tolkien’s work such a fascinating, complex read.
Redshirts by John Scalzi deconstructs an SFnal icon in a different way. In the classic Star Trek television series, you couldn’t kill off the stars, but you could kill the extras — and the extras often word red shirts. Scalzi runs with that idea in a book that is about living in the world of the redshirts and what it means to be on a ship where bad things constantly happen to people who seem to be there primarily to be eaten by an ice shark. And he does it in a way that is both wonderfully funny and a bit poignant as he looks beyond the easy jokes and slapstick (but not completely past!) into what it means to be one of those people. It’s a surprisingly thoughtful book given the subject matter, which made it that much more enjoyable to me.
You may have heard of George R.R. Martin. He’s an author who’s written an obscure series called Game of Thrones. He’s written a lot of other books as well, and my favorite of his is still Dying of the Light, his first novel. It is a love story, maybe, about loyalty and responsibility and family, set on world that was used as a galactic equivalent of a World’s Faire and is now returning to the dark and cold of interstellar space, mostly empty and mostly forgotten. On this fascinating bit of worldbuilding, Martin a complicated drama of personalities and emotions that intersect and conflict, as he pulls a couple with a long-dead love affair back together and collides it with a family full of tradition and responsibility. Throw in a bit of “I hate you enough to be willing to kill you” and you have a set of very interesting people in a complex set of conflicts that all feels very real as you work your way through the story. I’ve been spending some time this last year going back and exploring some of the books I read in my younger days and reconnecting with what excited my about science fiction and fantasy in the first place, and I’m happy to say Dying of the Light lived up to my memories of it, and continues to be one of my favorite books.
Diving into the Wreck, on the other hand, is a recent book. It’s classic space opera that takes the idea of wreck diving out of the water and into the deep of space. Toss in alien technology, an evil empire, faster than light travel and some interesting thinking about the implications of wormholes on space warfare, and you have an interesting and fun evening romp. It’s part of a series — I’ve read most of it, and they’re all good, interesting stories.
For the Photographer
Gary Crabbe has just come out with a new book describing the interesting areas to photograph in Northern California. It is chock full of his photography and it’s superb. This is a big book with good production values and the photographs are well-reproduced. Crabbe doesn’t do the “go to this parking lot and look north” bit, instead, he has written a guide intended to help you find places you want to explore and get you there — finding your photos is up to you. It’s an approach I really like rather than encouraging people to replicate an existing photo. This is not a book you’ll take into the field, I don’ think. It is, instead, the guide you’ll use to plan the trip in the first place.
One thing I did this year was replace my photo backpack. I am a bit of a bag geek, always trying to find a more perfect bag, so I finally forced myself to stop buying bags, research the hell out of the market, and pick up a couple of bags and live with them. The backpack I chose was the Think Tank Airport Accelerator, and I really like it. It’s large, and it’s a deep bag so many lenses can stand end up in it, allowing you to stuff even more into it than you might think. It’s comfortable as a backpack, but also has handles so you can haul it around that way. The only thing it doesn’t have you might want are roller wheels, but I decided I didn’t want that — I have a Penguin roller bag when I’m going that big and serious. For my smaller “street bag”, I ended up buying the Think Tank Retrospective 30. It holds enough that I can, in fact, carry two bodies and my three main lenses (24-105, 70-200F2.8, and my 300F4) in it, although it gets a bit hard to keep upright when stuffed that full. For it’s primary purpose, which is to carry a body with one or two lenses without hiring a sherpa, it works just fine. For some, the lack of much space in accessory pockets might be a problem, but since I tend to use packing cubes for holding all of my tiny stuff and stick them wherever they fit, this is a great bag for me. With these two bags in my arsenal, I find my temptation to go off and try out other bags has been seriously curtailed. Most of the time…
If you’re looking for something different for a photographer (or a gardener, for that matter), consider the ProFlex Kneeling Pad. This pad is big, it’s thick, and it’s built to put up with a lot of abuse. It’s not as cheap as those #4.99 pads you can buy at the garden store, but this one is going to be around for a while. My knees aren’t what they used to be, and I find I’m not as motivated to plop down in the mud and destroy my clothing for a shot as I used to be. This pad is a big help out in the field; it’s big enough to sit on, it’s big enough for me to kneel on, and if you need to, you can plop your camera down on it on a wall as an impromptu beanbag. Strap it onto your backpack and carry it with you, or as I seem to do a lot, sit on it in the back of the Subaru in the parking lot waiting for something interesting to happen. Either way, I’m glad I have this in the back of the car…
Do you know a photographer trying to improve their craft? Then turn them onto some interesting learning resources by buying them some titles. Craft and Vision is a boutique publishing house founded by photographer David duChemin. It publishes ebooks on many subjects about photographer. Most of the books are $5.00 and cover a specific subject in about 40-50 pages. They are cheap enough to be a stocking stuffer, but have a lot of good content and insight. I’ve read just about every one, and they are the books I find most useful when studying a subject these days.
Another great learning resource is CreativeLive, an e-learning organization co-founded by Chase Jarvis. As the name suggests, this group teaches live, online — you can tune into their seminars and interact with the teachers as the seminar is being taught for free, so if you can work your schedule around theirs, you can take every one of their classes and never pay a cent. Most of us can’t do that, so what I tend to do is pop in and browse classes when I can. Ones that I find especially interesting or useful I’ll then purchase and download and view the entire class as convenient to me. The classes are inexpensive: most are $99 or cheaper if you buy them while they are being taught, and $149 if you come back and buy them later. The “try for free” aspect of them means you know exactly what you’re getting before you give them any money, so there’s no risk at the course not living up to your hopes.
Some of the classes I’ve taken with them this year include Ben Willmore’s Photoshop for Photographers, Don Giannatti’s Tabletop Product Photography, Zack Arias’ Foundations of a Working Photographer, and David duChemin’s Vision-Driven Photography. Can you tell where my head was at this year? All of which gave me a lot more value than the price of the class, and I can’t recommend these classes enough.
Even better, Creative Live has just announced a sale — most of their seminars are discounted 20% between now and the end of the year.
Other Stuff
Finally, a couple of other things you might find useful. I’ve needed to record voice work for a couple of screencasts this year, so I went and got myself a decent microphone. The Yeti Blue microphone is a nice, inexpensive USB mike with good sound reproduction. It’s a nice compromise between price and sound quality and more than adequate for occasional work, and it’s built like a rock.
I also had to replace my headphones when my last pair wore out; I ended up grabbing the Sennheiser PX-200‘s. They come with a microphone and volume controls to drive an iPhone or other phone, have small closed ear padding that I find comfortable enough to wear all day at work without discomfort, and a good, clean sound both when I’m listening to music or podcasts or when they’re hooked up to the phone for a conference call. I ended up buying two pair, and keep one at work, and one here at my home office.
And last, but not least — I’ve weaned myself off of sweetened drinks (mostly), and so now I drink a lot of unsweetened iced tea. I had considered buying an iced-tea maker on and off for years, and always decided not to, because, after all, how hard is it to brew iced tea? But in fact, now that I bought this unit (the West Bend 2 3/4 quart model) I wonder why I waited so long. It’s about convenience: a couple of minutes of quick setup, push a button, and in ten minutes or so, you have iced tea ready to drink. Cleanup is simple, maintenance is minimal, and the quality is fine; just use good quality tea (i.e. not Lipton). One advantage of this unit over the old “drop the bags in the pitcher” technique is that if you forget and leave the bags in, the tea tends to go bitter after a day or so. Since the tea doesn’t stay in contact with the water here, it stays fresher longer. And since it’s so quick and easy to brew, I’m less likely to not get around to it and “make do” with some over beverage I shouldn’t be drinking…
Hopefully some of these suggestions will help you cross off the rest of your shopping list. And I hope you do have a great holiday.
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Some holiday gift ideas. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.