Camera club Secret Santa: what actually lands in a room of photographers

If you've been on both sides of this particular gift exchange more times than you'd care to admit, you probably think about it roughly like this.

Set the budget somewhere sensible, then stick to it

For a camera club, £10 to £15 is usually the sweet spot. Low enough that nobody feels awkward, high enough that you're not reduced to a chocolate orange and a packet of lens wipes. Some clubs go up to £20, which opens up a bit more room, but honestly the extra fiver rarely buys a better gift - it just buys a slightly nicer version of the same gift.

Whatever the number is, agree it before anyone starts shopping, and agree whether it's a hard ceiling or a rough guide. The person who turns up with a £35 gift when everyone else spent a tenner is not the hero of the evening. They're the person who's accidentally made everyone else feel cheap.

The golden rule: do not assume their brand

This is the one that trips people up. You might know that Dave shoots Canon and Priya is a Fuji evangelist, but in a Secret Santa draw you often don't know who you've got until you've already been browsing for an hour. And even if you do know, buying a Nikon-branded anything for a Nikon shooter feels oddly like buying someone a t-shirt of their own football team - fine, but a bit flat.

More importantly, brand-specific gifts assume the person is still shooting that brand, hasn't just switched, isn't quietly saving for a Leica, and finds their chosen manufacturer's logo genuinely charming rather than a thing they've stared at for ten years. Safer ground: gifts that work for anyone who takes photos, regardless of what's hanging round their neck.

Same logic applies to format snobbery. Don't buy the mirrorless-only person a joke about DSLRs being obsolete, don't buy the film shooter something that implies digital is cheating, and for the love of all things holy don't get into the full-frame vs crop sensor debate on a tea towel.

What actually lands

The gifts that go down best are the ones that poke fun at the behaviour of being a photographer, not the gear. Everyone in that room has stood in a wet field at six in the morning. Everyone has made a partner wait while they "just got one more shot". Everyone has that one friend who asks them to shoot a wedding as a favour.

So a print or a mug with a line that nails one of those shared experiences will usually get a proper laugh of recognition rather than a polite smile. For the landscape photographer in the club, a mug that just says Go on ahead, I'll catch up. Eventually. is the kind of thing that gets passed around the room. For the keen amateur, Dinner can wait. The light can't. tends to land. And for the club's wedding photographer, Wedding for free? Lovely. No. basically writes itself.

Beyond that, consumables are quietly brilliant for Secret Santa. A proper microfibre cloth set, a lens pen, a small blower, a decent notebook for shoot planning, a pack of gaffer tape in black (not duct tape, don't make that mistake). These aren't exciting but they're the stuff working photographers use up and never think to replace. A tenner on genuinely useful bits beats a tenner on a novelty tripod keyring.

What to avoid

A quick list of things that reliably miss:

• Anything that confuses photography with being a tourist. The "I love travel" camera-print tat on big marketplaces is mostly aimed at people who own a camera, not people who use one.
• Books of "inspirational" photography quotes. Nobody has ever read one of these twice.
• Cheap filter sets. They're worse than no filter and the recipient will know within thirty seconds.
• Anything with a resolution joke that stopped being true in about 2012. "My camera has more megapixels than yours" was tired when phones hit 12MP.
• Gag gifts about photographers being antisocial, grumpy, or weirdly obsessed. There's a line between affectionate and pointed, and it's thinner than you'd think when the subject is sitting right there opening it.

If in doubt

When you genuinely don't know the person you've drawn - new member, someone from the committee you've only nodded at - go for something that works on the shared joke of being a photographer at all, rather than something that requires you to guess their taste. A print they can stick above the desk where they edit, or a mug for the kitchen, both survive the "I don't actually know this person" problem better than, say, a specific accessory you're hoping fits their bag.

And if the whole thing is stressing you out more than a Secret Santa really should: a nice card, a decent bar of chocolate, and one well-chosen daft mug will see you through. Camera club people are, on the whole, a kind audience. They just really don't want another Canon-branded lanyard.