If you are not in the habit of bestowing year-round (prints, food, cash, lottery tickets), this is the season in which to do so. Some of the following are real and practical for photographers, and some, well… let’s think outside the continuum.
Consider acquiring a durable syringe, powered by one’s own grip, for your (or your beloved’s) darkroom. It’s a better way to remove dust from negatives and condensers than a pressurized can with warnings about accidental inhalation (until it’s empty, and you throw it away). Here’s the medium size: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000L9OIQC/ref=pe_62860_128743720_em_1p_1_ti
Film cases are neat and convenient for carrying 5 or 10 rolls of film in one’s bag or pocket. http://www.freestylephoto.biz/103581-35mm-Film-Hard-Case-White-Holds-10-rolls-of-film
An Instax would be very cool. We’re not kidding.
For one’s rough-and-tumble lifestyle, consider a construction site camera!
Make someone one of only 25 to own a Hexomniscope, the six-sided, six-“lens” roll film pinhole camera (it may be on back order).
http://www.abelsonscopeworks.com
See if you can locate (on *bay) a Dental-Eye camera, originally made for dentists, with a sort of a macro lens that cannot (doesn’t need to) focus out to infinity.
Everyone wants to read The Photographer’s Playbook as much as you do; weve gone through it to save you the time and effort, and we recommend the following twenty-four assignments/projects over the rest of the 307 suggestions: those on pages 4, 5, 14, 18, 19, 33, 54, 59, 60, 61, 67, 70, 72, 73, 125, 156, 158, 173, 198, 200, 267, 283, 324, and 343. As well, page 131 is a prompt to show work, and on page 126 begins the best advice in the entire book.
See also: “Sketchbook With Voices,” by Eric Fischl (maybe the most subversive book in the BHS Libr–uh, Media Center).
The rest of these “gift ideas” are from a long gone periodical. If anyone can identify the magazine or the photographer, so much the better, but it was a different time, and most of the piece is politically incorrect today (or not funny enough to reproduce).
Creative Camerawork 