“How would you like a new camera for your birthday?” Dan asked me shortly before my birthday in July. This was obviously a follow-up question to the question he’d asked me shortly before Christmas last year, namely, “How would you like a new camera for Christmas?”

“Why?” I responded both times. “I like my camera.”

To be clear, my current camera is a nifty little Canon that weighs about two grams and fits absolutely anywhere. It’s full of fancy controls, more than half of which I’ve never used, but which I’m sure would help me take better pictures if only I knew how to use them.

My camera is an old 3- or 4-megapixel camera that I bought for Dan for Christmas in December 2002, and which I inherited when I replaced it with a new 7- or 8-megapixel camera he wanted in 2006. Like me, it’s steady and reliable; It’s good at what it does; and it ain’t getting any younger.

“You take really good pictures,” Dan said now, “but some of them come out kind of blurry or grainy sometimes. I thought a new camera would help.”

Hey, my eyesight comes out kind of blurry a lot of the time.

I think about the kind of blurry, grainy, low resolution, bad pictures I take. Some of them come about because I put the camera on “manual” to adjust for dim lighting indoors and then forget to put it back on “automatic” when I go outside again. Or the other way around. I forget. “Most of my bad pictures are not because of a defective camera,” I told Dan. “They’re because of a defective photographer.”

Other blurry pictures result from my trying to take pictures with the lens all zoomed out, after sunset, without a flash. “What I really need is not a new camera, it’s a tripod.”I concluded this in both conversations, but I guess Santa didn’t believe me back at Christmastime. “A portable, lightweight tripod that I can easily take with me wherever I go.”

And voila! I received, for my birthday, the world’s cutest little portable tripod that looks like it was invented to take pictures on Mars.

It took a while before I had the need to try it out, but now that I have, I can say that this tripod, in addition to being an inherently funny object, works really great after sunset, too!