11 household items you can use to take better photos

Pricey accessories are great, but sometimes the tool you need is only a junk drawer away.

By Jeff Wignall/Pop Photo | Published Feb 22, 2019 3:10 AM EST

Small mirrors make excellent reflectors for all kinds of outdoor shots, including portraits and close-ups, but who wants to carry a sheet of glass around all day? Yikes! Acrylic mirrors are relatively lightweight and totally indestructible (they'll outlast the backpack you carry them in) and you can usually find them cheap at your local drug store. Mirrors are super-efficient reflectors and highly directional, good for opening a deep shadow area or creating a bold fill, in a portrait, for instance. Dan Bracaglia

As photographers, most of us are programmed to love gear. We dream of bags filled to the brim with enough accessories to fill a B+H catalog. The problem is that those accessories can be as expensive as they are useful and often they only fulfill a somewhat limited purpose. But accessories don’t have to be exotic or cost a lot to get the job done and with a little freethinking, you can turn lead into gold. The trick here is to think like MacGyver: see what fun and practical uses you can extract from ordinary everyday objects. You may not be able to find a way to blast your way out of a collapsed tunnel with a salt shaker, a stick of gum and a handful of pushpins, but you’d be surprised the cool things you can do with gizmos that you probably already own and that won’t dynamite your budget.

Here are some of our favorite “found” accessories and some suggestions for putting them to good use. MacGyver would be proud.