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Another useful idea from the DIYPhotography.net site

DIY: The Super-Small Bottle-Cap Tripod
When you are going on a field trip, you want your tripod to be small. Small and light. It would be best if it can fit in your pocket.

This sounded like a really quick and easy idea so I decided to give it a try. All in all it took about 10 minutes to scramble up the parts and crank out my own bottle-cap tripod. Just as several of the commenters noted, soda bottles are not the most stable so I tried it with a 2 liter bottle filled ¼ of the way with sand and it was rock solid, or at least as rock solid as a plastic bottle with a little point and shoot on top of it could be. While the solution worked for my quick and easy point and shoot, it was a total failure when I applied my D80 (surrounded by a REALLY think mound of pillows). Still you can’t beat the cost or the geek appeal when you pull one of these out at the next get together.

I am a gadget freak. Simple. To the point. True. I can’t help myself, I just love gadgets. I am also a photography nut and for those of you who know anything about photography you can agree it is a hobby made for gadget freaks. Unfortunately my bank account isn’t to the point (yet) where I can buy all the gadgets I fancy, so I often have to take the more sensible (read cheaper) route and make my own. When it comes to making your own gadgets few sites are as useful and as entertaining as Instructables.com. There you can find information on making a robotic mouse, your own water heater, and best of all lots of neat photography gadgets.

To make things easier they have a really nice search feature but I prefer simply searching by tags. A quick tag search for photography brings up a nice list of things that you too can make with often very in depth step-by-step instructions. Of course volunteers post all of these items and the quality can vary but for the most part they are well thought out projects that actually look like they work. So if you are interested in learning how to make the latest gadget or simply want to see what others have done you really should take a look at Instructables.Com