Yearly Archives: 2008

How (not) to sell your gear

Hall of Shame

Vive La France!

Unless you are a collector, it’s a solid practice to check that closet full of photo gear annually and sell anything untouched since you last looked. That especially applies to film gear which will very shortly become a genre for collectors only, as there will be no more film. Dump it now!

The very worst place to sell anything is eBay. You are selling to an ethically challenged audience though an auctioneer who disclaims any liability for anything. eBay is like the gun dealer who holds himself innocent because, after all, he did not pull the trigger. (Please, no lectures on the Second Amendment – any modern, civil society which permits handgun ownership is anything but a civil society).

Mercifully the French (no way the US tort-owned legal system would ever do this) have seen through this little game, as the WSJ reported yesterday:

In the US there are many amateur photo oriented sites which cater to classified ads, and you will not have to pay 15% in fees to eBay/PayPal in the process. My experience with these has been consistently good. They include:

  • Fredmiranda.com – if you can ever get them to actually post your ad. Lots of Canon DSLR gear, much of it higher end
  • Photo.net – some of the dumbest chat boards ever (Nikon v Canon garbage predominates), but sales are easy
  • Your local Craigslist.com – cheap (free!) and easy, but less photo oriented, obviously
  • Rff.com – mostly Leica and RF gear

Doubtless there are many others. Sure, they don’t offer fraud insurance but, then again, ask yourself why eBay feels the need to offer this.

A couple of years back when I sold all my film gear (phew! prices have crashed since) I did much of that on eBay because that’s all there really was. The alternatives did not have sufficient followings to constitute a broad market opportunity. That is changing.

In the meanwhile, if you must list on eBay, here are some of the steps I took to avoid being trapped by the ethically challenged:

  • No sales to foreigners – yes, that includes Canadians and the UK. (To make Canadians and Englishmen feel better, the same rule applies at your end). Dispute resolution is doubly difficult, multiple legal systems come in to play and you really want to do all those custom forms and constantly be asked to under-declare value, making you a felon? Eastern Europe? Don’t make me laugh. That’s where you go for illicit anything. Stick with the US and forget AK and HI where you will always lose money on fixed postage estimates. The US contains 100 million of the world’s most affluent consumers. What’s not to like?
  • Mail all packages UPS insured and make it clear in your ad that any damage in transit is the buyer’s responsibility and that the buyer must file the insurance claim with UPS. UPS makes this optional and you do not want to be the one filing the claim.
  • Overpack. Bubble wrap is cheap. “It arrived damaged” is Scam #1.
  • Keep and provide UPS tracking information – “I never received it” is Scam #2.
  • When listing make an extra effort to take the highest quality pictures and be fastidious about illustrating any dings, defects, etc. “You didn’t tell me about the ding, etc.” is Scam #3.
  • No returns. Ever. You want to loan your gear to a crook? “I need to return it” is Scam #4, and means the buyer got remorse (the spouse found out, likely as not) or used the camera for the weekend wedding and now wants his money back.
  • Don’t list for $1 hoping for the best. Set a realistic minimum selling price, make the listing for 7 days and make sure it ends on a Sunday afternoon. That’s when most buyers have time to look at their computers, which enhances the possibilities of a last minute bidding war. You will get fewer bids, but then an opening bid of $1 is not a bid (unless you are really unlucky and it sells for that!). Multiple bids do not correlate with the best selling price. One good one will do. Still, if you like excitement, list at $1 and keep your fingers crossed. You will not do as well as I will.
  • Don’t use price reserves. Would you bid on something whose price is unknown? Plus, reserves cost extra. Use minimum selling prices as described above.
  • Be realistic about setting a minimum bid price. I generally look at completed auctions (active listings are useless as the price is not known), check a few other sites and set the starting price at 80% of the expected selling price. My failure rate (meaning no sale) was 5% using this approach, based on 40 listings.
  • If selling a camera or lens, include some snaps taken with the gear. That says you are a user, not a clueless dealer, and sincere about the function of the equipment.
  • Don’t waste money on listing enhancements like bold face and color. Educated buyers search by description, not listing appearance.
  • If you start your listing at 80%, add a ‘Buy It Now’ option at 110%. This will attract buyers who really want your item and do not want the bidding war risk. Fully 40% of my auctions sold for the ‘Buy It Now’ price, generally within 24 hours of listing.
  • Forget about making a killing. Price discovery in the market for used cameras is perfect, unless you are selling Oscar Barnack’s original Leica, in which case you need to use the higher class crooks at Sotheby’s and Christies.
  • Don’t ever leave bad feedback. You will get in a time wasting argument and do nothing for your sale prospects down the road (because I guarantee that you will get retaliatory bad feedback, and good luck trying to get eBay to remove it), even if you were right. Saying nothing and swallowing your pride is the path to success here. Though, come to think of it, I just checked today and guess what?

    So now, even if your buyer assaults you, he remains a good guy. Great system, huh?

  • If you have high value outfits, it generally makes better sense to sell them piecemeal (body, lens, etc.) than as a kit. You will get better aggregate proceeds. Kits attract what I call the ‘kit discount’. Easier to sell as a kit, sure, but it’s your money.
  • I sold some 40 items over one year and it took a while to learn the above. Since then the only complaint I have is the egregious fees charged by eBay and PayPal (which is owned by, you guessed it, eBay. Based on prior fines, PayPal is the place to launder your illicit drug proceeds – it’s nothing more than a poorly regulated bank, though in the US I suppose ‘poorly’ is axiomatic when it comes to the methadone cases who are bank regulators here).

In summary, if you start with the premise that you will be cheated and follow the steps above you will greatly mitigate the risks. Above all, be scrupulously honest in your listing.

Here’s an extract from my recent listing which applies the above rules:

No problem. The camera was as described, the buyer honest.

If you know a little HTML you can have hyperlinks to your detailed slideshow at your ISP – as above – avoiding eBay’s additional fees and securing a better presentation in the process. The pictures also serve as a perfect record in the event a fraudster alleges damage or other non-existent faults.

Now here’s the one for the lens:

Note the use of a free lens hood teaser if the buyer elects ‘Buy It Now’. The buyer of that one left me perfect feedback ….

…. then filed a claim with UPS alleging the goods were damaged. UPS paid him $300 and he got to keep the lens – see what I mean?

But, best of all, if you have fake gear to sell, list it on eBay because the US legal system will never do anything about it. And then you will be just another typical eBay seller.

And meanwhile, eBay and PayPal, I am pleased to add you to the Hall of Shame – a destination at which you arrived years ago.

Canon and Goebbels

Hall of Shame

Imitating the Great Liar

That infamous master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, remarked that if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Generations of politicians, lawyers and marketers (many of these know all about lying, of course) have taken that to heart, none more than Canon in their advertisement for their latest consumer grade DSLR. This sells for $750. Doubtless a competent and effective tool and you can see their slick ad here.

But that’s not the point. Clearly the TV ad is advertising their inexpensive mass market camera body.

No. What gets my goat is that there’s another video wherein Canon prides itself on explaining just how the ad was made – the second one of the choices on the right. A minute or so into it and we are told that no fewer than ten Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III cameras were used by the pros to take the snaps in the ad video. Last I checked those run $7,800 a pop or some ten times the cost of the featured product.

So how, pray, do pictures taken on a $7,800 camera end up misrepresented as having been taken on a consumer DSLR one tenth of the cost? And why, if the new cheap model is so good, was it not used to take the snaps in the ad? Never mind the carefully chosen words in the above (“….real photographs taken by Canon digital SLR cameras….”) the opening shot of the ad shows Mrs. Housewife clearly using the consumer DSLR, immediately cutting to the snaps taken by pros using the top of the line $8k honker. Not that you would know, of course. Anyone watching the ad would conclude exactly what Canon and its sleazy US management and lawyers intend – that all the pictures you see were taken on the camera shown.

Shame on you, Canon.

Macro Day

Photographs

Finally a solid field test.

Flowers? Fughedaboutit! I don’t do flowers. Millions do, all better than me, so why bother?

Give me a choice between Yosemite and the local workshop (mine!) and the latter wins every time. Used motor oil smells far nicer than all that foul fresh air. And flowers.

So when it came to find a serious subject for my macro rig, I would have to suggest that that posits the issue backwards. I bought the rig because of my intended subject, rather than having to go in search of something to macrosnap (my word!). And given that I’m an engineer by graduation and a mechanic when time permits, it can hardly come as a surprise that my object of choice was the machine. Or machines, to get it right.

Those poor deprived masses who have never attended a motor race are missing three things, only two of which can be recreated in the home theater. Sight and sound. But unless Nintendo is about to perfect it – quite possible given the genius of the Wii – you cannot get the third, the missing ingredient. The smell. You have to go to the races to enjoy that. Same with horses I suppose, though I never trust anything which eats while you sleep and lacks a gearbox. And let’s face it, horses stink.

Thus Tuesday found me at Laguna Seca, not 2 hours north of the old estate which I call home, in the paddock, surrounded by some one hundred vintage race cars, from million dollar Ferraris to plain vanilla Austin Healeys. As a design maven I’m generally more fixated on the unity of form and function than I am with speed on the track, so my happiest times are spent in the paddock. As this is an amateur event, the teams are very friendly, and only too willing to show off their machines. You can get close to anything with no questions asked.

While the hand-held combination of Canon 5D/100mm Canon Macro lens/Ring Flash looks cumbersome, it is, in practice, very easy to handle and with the 5D’s magnificent autofocus most of your attention can be devoted to the subject rather than the technology. In bright sunlight, which was the case at this event, the ring flash – inherently shadowless lighting – acts as a dynamic range enhancer by filling in the shadows. The circuitry in the 5D balances the natural and artificial light sources, so original shadows are preserved and not unnaturally duplicated (as would be the case with off-axis flash) and the whole thing becomes a printer’s dream rather than a nightmare. Just check the natural shadows in the snaps below.

It was simply striking in the extreme how all this automation frees the photographer to focus on the subject. After several dry runs at home, my confidence level was such that I never once felt the need to consult the LCD screen on the 5D after the first snap. Unlike Apple hardware, It Just Works. Thank you Canon and thank you El Cheapo Chinese aftermarket manufacturer of the ring flash.

After some two years I have got sick and tired of all those landscape prints decorating the garage, so I reeled off a dozen of these on the HP DesignJet 90 and will have them mounted and framed by the weekend. As I write this the last few are rolling out to the accompaniment of the merry clack-clack of that wonderful printer and the foul smell with which HP sees fit to invest its printing inks.

Technically there are actually quite a few limitations. First, your shutter speed has to be 1/200th or slower to accommodate the 5D’s needs. Second, if there’s any depth in your subject you really need to stop down if you want things sharp all over. Third, because you have to use slower shutter speeds, in bright sunlight that means cranking down the ISO to 50 or 100. I found myself wishing more than once that the 5D had what I call a Kodachrome 25 speed. You know, ISO 25. Really slow. Finally, while the 100mm macro gives you nice lens-to-subject distance, you will struggle getting a parallel plane relative to high horizontal subjects. (Reread and work it out! It means standing on tiptoe ….)

Here are a few of the snaps whose primary goal was to focus on the abstract beauty of man-made machines.

What of the quality of the originals? My rejects were deleted owing solely to composition issues, never because of a lack of sharpness. As I use shutter priority (to avoid going faster than the maximum sync speed of 1/200th) the 5D selects the aperture and this seems to have varied from f/4 to f/22, with ISO anywhere from 100 to 320. Regardless of the aperture used, the originals are critically sharp (after the usual sharpening of the RAW originals in Lightroom) and easily scale to 30″ x 45″ on the screen. And not a burned-out highlight to be found. Stick your nose in the dozen 18″ x 24″ prints I just made and your biggest risk is personal injury – your schnozzer is likely to sustain cuts from the incredible sharpness and resolution in the print. You could probably improve on this with a large format camera – 4″ x 5″ say – but the ergonomics and miniscule depth of field that gear suggests would simply make the rig unworkable.

On a closing note, I am constantly reminded of Charles Coburn’s line in Monkey Business when a very curvaceous Marilyn Monroe, as his secretary, exits the room to the adoring glances of Coburn and Cary Grant. Grant looks quizzically at Coburn who shrugs and replies “Anyone can type”. With this rig, “Anyone can do macro”.

Form and Function

Photographs

Not something to be found today.

Leather hood straps are de rigeur on any sporty automobile with claims to classic status but rarely are they as exquisitely crafted as this one with a built in tensioning spring.


Bonnet strap on an early Miller racer, c. 1925. 5D, 100mm macro, ring flash

About the snap: Gamblers

About the Snap

Date: January, 2000
Place: Bay Meadows race track, San Francisco’s South Bay Area
Modus operandi: Troubled
Weather: Indoors
Time: 2pm
Gear: Leica M3, 50mm Summicron
Medium: Kodak Gold 100
Me: Ugh!

Imagine if you can a system which takes money from those least able to afford it and legalizes it. The concept behind the Coliseum cynically updated.

Because that is what California has accomplished though its legalized gambling. Some is state sponsored (our government seeks to exploit its citizens’ weaknesses to make hay), some privately owned like the Bay Meadows race track just south of San Francisco. And, of course, if you are an American Indian you can trade on the white man’s guilt and the sky is the limit, Indian tribes being the largest casino operators in the state. Hardly surprising – congressmen are cheap to buy.

Into the gambling hall at Bay Meadows and there they were, like so many academics, whiling their time and milk money away.

The glow from the objects of their attention – TV monitors with all the latest odds – adds to the opium den feel of the whole thing.