4. DSLR Accessories

DSLR Accessories

Just because you’re not buying your favorite shutterbug a DSLR for the holidays doesn’t mean you can’t champion the cause. Camera enthusiasts often tend to invest heavily in gear that protects their bodies and lenses, so you can help them along with these accessories.

BuiltNY Medium Cargo Camera Bag

Price: About $45

DSLR carrying cases tend to come in either enormous backpacks and duffels or boxy, unattractive shoulder bags. Built NY, known for its neoprene laptop cases and wine carriers, has a different take. The Medium Cargo Camera bag is small and curvy. It is staid black on the outside while light-blue colors on the inside allow you to easily see the gear inside (other wackier colors are available). It doesn’t scream, “I’m full of expensive gear—steal me!” Yet it manages to pack tons of cushioning and space into an anything-but-bulky bag. We were able to use removable Velcro dividers to fit one body, two lenses, a cable, a charger, and CF cards in this “medium” bag. Built NY also makes a large version.

SanDisk CompactFlash Card Accessories

Price: $32.99 to about $650

Everyone from professional photographers to DSLR dabblers requires CompactFlash memory cards to share pictures with other devices, especially PCs. SanDisk is the most well respected brand for this commodity, which will cater to the photographer in your life who needs more gigabytes.

A basic 8 GB CF card from SanDisk costs about $35 online. Naturally, the company makes these cards in a range of sizes and speeds. The top-of-the-line model is the 64 GB Extreme Pro card. If you’re interested in knocking your photographer friend’s socks off, the Extreme Pro card, which costs about $650, is smaller than a matchbook and holds more data than some older laptops still in use today. But for a professional, the more impressive statistic is that the Extreme Pro card can save files or copy them to another drive at a rate of 90 MB/s. This speed is the fastest available on the market and can mean the difference between getting the shot and missing it. However, only a few cameras can actually take advantage of these speeds.

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To be able to load files from the card to a computer at the 90 MB/s rate, a compatible card reader is needed. For this, SanDisk  offers the $49.99 Extreme Pro ExpressCard adapter, which plugs into a computer’s ExpressCard slot (not all computers have an ExpressCard slot, but the ExpressCard reader does work with any type of CF card). If a photographer is lucky enough to pair a 64 GB Extreme Pro Card with a compatible camera and card reader, he or she will be one of the fastest shooters alive.

SanDisk also makes a basic All-in-One card reader for $32.99 that will load up images from a CF card at the rate of 34 MB/s. It can solve an entire family’s digital-photography transfer problems by transferring images to the PC via USB from everyone’s memory card, including the DSLR and every size and shape of point-and-shoot digital cameras. It is a shiny black rectangle that could slip into almost any camera bag, but it also comes with a metal stand so that the reader is conveniently situated when it is sitting on a desk.

Joby GorillapodSLR

The original Gorillapod has earned a reputation as a lightweight vacation tripod. Use the bendy legs to set your camera up in the sand, on a mountain top, or virtually anywhere in an urban environment and still get a steady, level shot. If there’s a pole or other mountable surface handy, wrap the Gorillapod legs around it, set your camera’s timer, and get a good angle on a picture with you in it. Naturally, the new SLR version holds the weight of a bulkier camera (up to 1.75 lbs.), and attaches via the universal quarter-inch tripod screw found on the underside of most DSLRs. --Rachel Rosmarin

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