Gorillapod SLR:From www.joby.com/uk, €39.95 plus €13.53 shipping
YOU'VE CLIMBED TO the top of a mountain in the Sierra Nevada, or found a sunlit pool beneath a waterfall in Australia's Blue Mountains. You want a photograph of yourself and the gang at the scene to back up your gloating when you get home, but there are no flat surfaces to stand a camera tripod on.
That's when you'll wish you had a Gorillapod. It's a lightweight tripod with flexible joints and legs that can balance on or wrap around almost anything: a rock, a tree, a lamp post or, as Playboy magazine noted, even a bed frame.
It weighs a mere 165g, folds neatly to fit in a suitcase or daypack, and has a quick-release plate that will take any type of still or video camera.
The original Gorillapod, which is slightly cheaper, was designed for lightweight point-and-shoot digital cameras; this new one will handle heavier SLR models. There's another model that will take an SLR and long lens.
Now comes the hard part: learning how to use your camera's self-timer.