Camera Ornament

We do, and the Camera ornament is stocked here on the Chive site throughout the year. My neighbor Ellery bought two, one for the tree and one that lives on a shelf beside a rangefinder he no longer uses, which he says is company for it. He does not elaborate on that, and I have decided not to press him. Fair enough.

It is, and it belongs in a stocking specifically. The tree gift tends to go to the main thing somebody is known for; the stocking is where the second interest gets acknowledged, which is often the one they would rather talk about. Ellery has received exactly one photography gift in thirty years. It was this.

Give it to somebody who takes pictures constantly and shows almost none of them. Ellery has photographed everything that has happened to him since the mid-nineties and has shown the results to no one, storing the negatives in a chest freezer he bought for the purpose and never plugged in. The seal is the point. Not the cold.

Hand-painted glass over a blown black body, with the silver lens barrel built up in several passes so it carries depth instead of reading as a flat circle. The strap detail is painted, not applied. Ellery turned it once to check the barrel length against the body, set it down, and said nothing. From him that is a review.

It is 3.25 inches wide and 2 inches tall, so it hangs wider than it is deep and faces outward instead of side-on. That makes it an outer-branch piece at about the height where somebody sitting down would see it. Ellery hung his at sofa height and then sat down to check. It checked out.

Keep it wrapped with something soft against the lens barrel, since that is the raised element and the first thing a hard edge will find in a shared box. A shallow compartment is better than a deep one. Ellery stores his in a lens pouch, which is either obvious or too obvious. He is untroubled by the distinction.

Plenty — the Music & Hobbies collection covers instruments, tools, games and the various things people defend at dinner, all in the same hand-painted glass. Ellery went through the whole page and reported that the tape measure was the best of them, which says a certain amount about Ellery. He was not entirely wrong.

No, it does not come in a gift box. It ships in protective packaging designed to keep a lens-shaped protrusion from meeting anything hard in transit, which is a shipping problem rather than a presentation one. Ellery wrapped his spare in a page of contact sheets, taped it badly, and handed it over. It survived.