At The Risk Of Seeming Paranoid...

Have you ever seen the look on your face when you need to appear in a family photo and don't have a tripod to prop up your camera? What do you do? You pick the least important of the rellies to take a picture of the group. You set it carefully for them and caution them not to change anything...

But you are acutely aware all the time that they have the thing in hand of just how many function buttons, adjustment wheels, and optional switches exist on your camera. Let's face it - you bought it for YOURSELF and you enjoy changing settings.

There is also the added factor that no matter who you select to take the picture, they go from being a normal human to a space monster with slime-coated fingers on the end of tentacles that go everywhere...and clumsy? Oh goodness - your $3000 DSLR with the lens that is so expensive that you burned the receipt before the wife saw it is a safe in the hands of The Mangler as if it was a ball of wadded up tissue.

This is why your eyes in the picture have that Mr. Bean look.

Well do yourself a favour and get a Nikon Coolpix AW 130. It's not just an underwater camera - you could use this on the Simpson Desert. It is a shock-proof camera - Nikon state that it will survive falls up to 2.1 metres.

The lens is protected by a frontispiece of armoured glass - pressure resistant to 30 metres. The battery/card/USB socket door is sealed with a rubber plate and a two-part rotary lock - it can't pop open suddenly in the hands of The Mangler.

It has 16 megapixels built in, a world map to identify where you have taken your pictures, and there is WiFi connection to iOS or Android OS to let you shoot with it, see images, and transfer them to your smart device.

It has an easy-to-use shutter button and the kind of ergonomics that even a squid can master. And the squid can take video with it. It could very well be the camera for the holiday season as well as for the holiday - you cannot improve your relatives at the party but you can take precautions against them. And the relief on the eyestrain is tremendous...

Note the little brush in the picture of he camera with the battery/card/USB hatch open. That's to make sure you are never going to trap sand grains in the seal and compromise the integrity of the water seal.