Unless you have the steadiest of hands, tripods are the key to avoiding camera shake when shooting at night and in no-flash-allowed museums.

But what traveler wants to add that weight and bulk to their luggage? This gadget, available in six colors, is a rubber bottle cap topped by a ball-and-socket platform that screws into the bottom of your camera.

Take a plastic bottle filled with water (or sand or pebbles), cover its top with this cap and attach it to your camera. Ingenious! Well ... the doohickey comes with Japanese-only instructions; the Web site says it's for "bottles 28.5 to 30.5 mm diameter." Huh?

We're not in the habit of measuring our bottles, so we tried those at hand. It fit snugly on top of a 20-ounce Pepsi bottle. While it's billed as a device for digital cameras, it worked with our old Minolta film camera, and offers a nice 30-degree tilt in every direction for different angles. Heavy cameras don't fare well.

Available from Semsons & Co., 626-574-5557, semsons.com.