Telescopic Camping Lantern

A camping lantern usually lights your shoes. The bulb sits low in a squat housing, the housing sits on the ground, and everything above knee height stays dark while the grass underneath gets a thorough interrogation.

Outask's Telescopic Camping Lantern hides a telescoping pole inside its own body, collapsing to roughly the size of a water bottle and pulling out to 93 centimetres. Raising the top section carries the light source up and away from the base. That spreads it across the width of a tent or a pitch instead of pooling it at your feet, and at full extension it clears head height, which is the difference between a lit campsite and a lit patch of ground. A button at the base releases a folding bracket on its own. The lantern then stands as its own tripod, with nothing to assemble in the dark. A second mount lets the lamp holder clip onto a backpack strap, turning the same unit into a walking light.

Three physical forms, then, and no separate attachments for any of them: held in the hand as a flashlight, set down as a desk lamp, raised as a pole light. It comes in four colours. The prices on those colours sit more than fifty dollars apart on the same Amazon listing, which is worth checking before you settle on a favourite, because Outask sells through that storefront only and has no separate website of its own.