Fancy a challenge? Somewhere in this beautiful heather covered heath I dropped a small plastic cube about 2cm across, it's only worth about £5 but if you find it, it's yours… any takers? anyone? hello?

Ok, so it's not worth spending hours looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack when this small cube, a hot shoe spirit level to give it it's proper name, only costs a few pounds to replace. On the other hand, I drop these things so often it's becoming very annoying and despite the fact that they are luminous green, I never find them again. It's not just spirit levels either, my remote shutter release often works itself loose and disappears into the undergrowth where it finds a dark corner to hide in until I give up the search and resign myself to another Amazon order.

After this last escape incident I decided enough was enough and set about coming up with a solution to the problem - other than ordering a lorry load of the things that is. Remarkably I came up with one...

You will need - 1 hot shoe spirit level, 1 elastic band

Step 1 - Wrap elastic band fairly tightly around the spirit level

Step 2 - Fit spirit level to hot shoe and roll band down et voila no more lost cubes

An equally simple solution presented itself to the remote shutter release problem. I'd already wrapped the cable up in a small bungee cord to keep it tidy and more importantly prevent it from dangling in the water in an attempt to drown itself (this one came from Think Tank Photo with one of their rather nice Cable Management bags). I just stepped up security by wrapped the cord around the camera strap as well. Here's one I prepared earlier...