Skill will carry you a long way in photography, but the right accessory is what moves you from "pretty good" to "wait, you took that?" There's a fresh roundup over on MSN with twelve gadgets for shooting better photos, and I nodded along through most of it.

Let me tell you about my first digital camera, because it explains why I love lists like this. A cousin handed me down a Sony Mavica that saved photos straight onto a floppy disk. The screen was the size of a saltine cracker and every photo came out fuzzy as an old memory. The battery had a habit of giving up right when the light got good, naturally. Twenty shots to a disk, and I felt like an absolute wizard...

We've come a long way since then, and the funny part is that the useful accessories now cost less than that camera did. A decent tabletop tripod runs about fifteen dollars, and it fixes the problem I see more than any other when someone hands me a blurry photo: shaky hands. A remote shutter button, the kind that pairs over Bluetooth so you're not sprinting into frame after a ten-second timer, is one of those small purchases that quietly changes how you shoot. If you shoot a lot of video, a handheld gimbal with three-axis stabilization will smooth out the wobble, but I'd still start with the humble tripod.

The roundup also gets into artificial light sources, interchangeable lenses, light meters, and camera filters. Some of those are wonderful, and some are solutions hunting for a problem. Cheap glass will make your photos worse, while a good lens genuinely widens what your camera can see. My rule is the same one I apply to smart locks and tablets: the gear has to solve a problem you actually have, or it's just clutter with a charging cable.

And my favorite item on any list like this costs about a dollar. When was the last time you cleaned your camera lens? My granddaughter Jess will tell you the first thing I ask when she shows me a blurry photo is whether she wiped the lens first. Nine times out of ten a pocket full of fingerprints is the whole problem, and no gadget can outspend a smudged piece of glass.

Buy the tripod. Buy the microfiber cloth. Skip anything that needs its own app and a firmware update before it will consent to hold your phone steady. I've taken some of my favorite photos on equipment that would make a professional wince, and the heavy old tripod from my husband's closet has never once dropped a camera. Give me steady hands and clean glass, and everything else is gravy.