Photo courtesy of Joby.Joby's family of Gorillapods offer solutions for supporting all types of devices, cameras and smartphones. The flexible legs can wrap around objects enabling a photographer to steady a camera just about anywhere. Easily fits into a Christmas stocking.

I’m not a camera geek, but I do keep up on useful and interesting photo gear. Here’s a short list of stocking suffers and new camera info for photo enthusiasts.

Photoshop Elements

Price: around $70

An excellent, entry-level, image-editing program. For real photo hobbyists, a photo-editing software program is highly recommended. These types of programs help organize, edit and color-manage photographs. There are several programs, but Adobe’s Photoshop is an industry standard and one of the most widely used. Photoshop Elements is a cheaper and somewhat stripped-down version of PS but still a powerful tool for any photographer.

Photo courtesy of Joby.Joby's family of Gorillapods offer solutions for supporting all types of devices, cameras and smartphones. The flexible legs can wrap around objects enabling a photographer to steady a camera just about anywhere. Easily fits into a Christmas stocking.

Joby GorillaPods

Price: From $19.95.

These colorful, bendable, mount-anywhere tripods are pretty cool tools to level any playing field, literally. I make a habit of carrying a portable tripod in my camera bag, and one of these is in my future. They can handle anything from smartphones to full-sized DSLRs, and you can stand or wrap them around anything.

Eye-Fi Wireless SD cards

Price: From around $40

Want to have the Internet uploading capability of your smartphone in your camera? With built-in Wi-Fi, these memory cards enable you to transfer images and video straight from your camera to your computer or your favorite sharing site when you are in range of a specified wireless network. You can select up to 32 networks for your card, and you can send to over 25 popular websites, including Facebook, flickr and YouTube.

Point-and-shoot cameras

Price: $250 to $500

There is a lot of innovation going on in this range of cameras. Here are a few.

l Samsung TL500. Has a maximum aperture of f1.8 on its 24-72mm zoom lens. Excellent for low-light photography.

l Nikon Coolpix S8100. Features a 30-300mm lens and has a pre-shooting cache that records up to two shots BEFORE the shutter-release is fully pressed. Wow! This could be the solution to missed photos due to shutter-lag.

l Fuji FinePix Real 3D W3. Film your own version of “Avatar” with this 3D-capable camera. The camera combines two images from two angles for a 3D representation on your camera’s LCD. Download the video or photos to a 3D-capable TV or 3D-ready computer for viewing in 3D with special glasses.

To research cameras go to dpreview.com

Shop prudently. Photograph wisely.

— Chief Photographer Mike Yoder can be reached at 832-7141.