Love them or loathe them, the selfie has transcended social novelty to become a total everyday photography ‘norm’. Taking a selfie is such a common occurrence that we now have smartphones and cameras that have been completely designed to snap the picture perfect images of the photographer themselves. But our technological obsession with taking the perfect selfie doesn’t end there! The selfie phenomenon has itself spawned a flurry of gadgets, all aimed at helping photographers take better self portraits on the move. But how many of these weird and wonderful devices have you heard of? And which made it past the drawing board?

Sticks

Believe it or not these monopod devices first appeared around 1925 and were used by individuals to take self portraits with cameras. Nowadays we are far more used to seeing groups of friends out on the town or daytripping families using them with smartphones. Blamed in part for spurring people on to take dangerous photographs and seen by many as blight in tourist hotspots, selfie sticks are now banned from many locations

Spectacles

We’ve mentioned these before in a recent trends update as social media folks Snapchat have been trying to make camera specs a thing for a while now. Snapchat spectacles actually have an outward facing camera and are designed for photographing, video-ing and uploading life on the move. They may not be particularly selfie friendly but as a product of a platform that’s popularity was built on selfies, we couldn’t miss them off the list. Plus, there’s no reason you can’t talk off your glasses to snap yourself.

Shoe

As fabulous an invention as the selfie stick is, sometimes it’s just not possible to get the shot you want by holding your camera out in front of you. Enter, the selfie shoe, a gadget that allows you to photograph from your foot thanks to a handy smartphone dock. Unfortunately this gadget never made it into the real world as it was conceived as an April Fool’s joke in 2015 but it’s one that would have come in very handy in locations where selfie sticks are banned.

Airselfie

Once upon a time all you had to worry about when posing for a self-taken photo was getting into position before the flash went off. Now, with the invention of the Airselfie you can fly a selfie-taking drone via your smartphone. This gadget will allow you to photograph yourself (or anything else) from all sorts of angles, though you’ll need to do so within the three minutes of battery life. Read more on this curious gadget in this article.

Do you use a selfie stick or would you consider using a drone to take the perfect self portrait to put on canvas? Want to hone your selfie-taking skills? Check out our post on taking the perfect selfie.