Today is day one of my week-long series on gadget gift recommendations, starting with photography as our first theme. For the 21st century shutter bug on your list I've chosen five innovative yet inexpensive digital devices that offer the gift to edit, shoot, record, track, and save your best pictures. These days everyone has a camera, even if it's just the one that came with theor cellphone, making this a category you just can't go wrong with.

Mac/PC

$130

Elements is the family-friendly version of Photoshop offering powerful editing features, but with an easier degree of learning. Just released this year, the 8th edition offers an exceptional system for both organizing and editing your photos. Photoshop can now analyze your photos, allowing it to automatically sort your pictures as well as perform the most-basic fixes, without losing your original photos. It goes beyond face recognition to person recognition, meaning it can be trained to recognize the identity of your friends and family, allowing it to automatically pick them out from new photos as you add them.

The list of new features is far to long to go into here, but as Photoshop is best known for its magical editing tools, I'll describe two of the newest and most impressive. Recompose allows you to change the shape and ratio of a photograph, but keep all the important elements. A widescreen photo of three kids running in a field can become a portrait-sized photo as the program simply edits out sections of the field and sky no one will notice missing. Before, the kids were far apart, now they are close together, but you wouldn't know it unless you compared the two.

Photomerge allows you to take two photographs that are similar and combine them into a single "perfect" one. Simply use a drawing tool to colour over the parts of each photo you want to include and it will auto-edit them out and reassemble them into a new photo. This is perfect for group shots, especially with kids where you can often get one person to look at the camera or smile, but rarely them all. 

Canon Powershot S780 IS 

$280

Approximately two quarters high, this is Canon's smallest digital camera, small enough to fit into the palm of your hand and close in size to the novelty spy cams sold at specialty stores. But make no mistake, this is not a novelty item. In an astounding feat of engineering, Canon has managed to fit the features of a full-sized camera into the smaller body including 12.1 Megapixels. optical image stabilization, both a 2.5" LCD display and a glass viewfinder, auto-scene selection, face detection, and the ability to record High Definition video at 720p with a built-in HDMI port for playback onto an HDTV. Add a quick start-up and shoot time (did I mention burst mode?), an array of photo effects (including night and long shutter modes) 3x optical, 4x digital zoom, Canon's high quality glass lens and DIGIC 4 image processor and you have quite a steal, especially for its price tag. This is the spy camera to beat all spy cameras. 

GardenWatchCam

$190

eScience.ca 

This special camera system is designed to record time-lapse movies of your plants as they grow. You can set it to record a photo every few seconds or any interval all the way up to 24 hours. The durable, weather resistant camera comes with a special ground stake with an adjustable joint, but can also be mounted onto a traditional tripod. It has both a macro mode for focusing on single plants or a landscape mode for taking in an entire garden. Just leave it to record for a few days or weeks and then retrieve the 2 GB USB flash drive and insert it into your computer to watch the resulting movie. Of course you don't have to use it for a garden, it can be used to capture any process over time. 

Sony GPS Image Tracker

$180

The next time you travel with your camera, carry this GPS unit with you. It will track your movements and synchronize with your camera to record where you took each photo. Back on your computer, you can then add your photos to Google Earth and create fun photo tours of your travels. It runs off of a AA battery, works with all camera models and while Sony supplies their own software, you can use any photo program that supports geotagging (photos with GPS data added). Comes with a rain guard and works well even on cloudy days. 

Here's how it works. You turn on both the GPS Tracker and your camera, making sure that the clock is the same on both. With the GPS tracker clipped to a bag or an area where it will have a line of sight to the sky, walk around and take your photos. The camera adds the time each photo was taken, the GPS unit records your movements as well as the time. When you're done taking pictures, take the memory card out of the camera, insert it into the image tracker and it will add the relevant GPS info based on the time each photo was taken. When you upload your photos to your computer, any program that supports geotagging will access the GPS data and can use it. Both Sony's included software and other programs like Picasa can automatically match your photos up to Google Earth. Works for videos too. 

Panasonic Vancouver 2010 Olympic SDHC Memory Cards

4GB - $60

8 GB - $100

16 GB - $150

Branded with the mascots of the winter Olympics, these memory cards offer more storage for your photos, but more importantly more speed. When you're trying to photograph sports events the action goes by fast. With these cards your camera won't have to wait for the photo to be saved before taking the next shot and video recording will go smoother. Ideal for cameras with burst modes or continuous shooting and High Definition camcorders. The difference between these and other SD memory cards is their Class 10 speed classification, allowing for 10MB/sec transfers.