It isn’t often that you hear about photography equipment saving lives.  It was a theme in Jurassic Park III when the graduate student and photographer, Billy Brennan, is saved from the raptors by his lucky pack back/camera bag. But in real life not so much.  By the way I love movies where the scientist is the hero! But now we have it stranger than truth … This past week the Johns family from Texas was saved by a selfie stick and the whole event was recorded by the video camera that was attached to the stick.

The Johnses were swimming off the coast of Nantucket in Massachusetts, when they got caught in a riptide. You probably thought that this was going to be a story about sharks, since sharks have been nibbling on people up and down the East coast this summer.  Derrick Johns used the stick to pull his daughter Erynn 16 towards the shore where a good Samaritan pull her in the rest of the way. Pretty scary stuff!  But as selfie sticks have developed a bad press and are banned from many locations, it may be time to reconsider them as life saving devices. How about a selfie stick defibrillator combination?