Mavica or How to Sell your Product on eBay or Marktplaats

Today I had some free time waiting for the Oxfam guys to come pick up a sleeping couch we wanted to get rid off. I always prefer giving to them to simply throwing out. But hey, that's not for now. As I wrote last time I have started working at a photography school and I was talking to my colleague about my old Mavica that's lying around our place and I decided to put it on here. Seeing that the photos tie in nicely with product photography I'm talking about that as well. Just have a quick read about the old beast right after the jump >>>

 The Mavica

The Sony Digital Mavica is one of the earlier point-and-shoot digital consumer cameras and it is a marvel. The original was released in 1981 and looked really similar to SLRs of those days. This Mavica though is from 1997 and opened, as I said, the digital market to the consumer. It works exactly the same as a normal point-and-shoot, but it's just ancient. Think of it as your not-so-hip father and/or mother who is in every aspect as much a human as you are, but let's not pretend they are of the same model as you are. They prefer different music, clothing, food, and basically almost everything, to what you prefer. That's okay, for they are from a different time, and so is this beast of a camera. In the same way that your parents might still be sitting at home listening to the old LP records and you are listening to you 64gb iPhone5, streaming the music through Spotify as you walk around town. And except for the size the biggest surprise is the medium you store your photos on. No high-end CF or SD cards here, nope, it uses the old 3,5" floppy discs! Bloody H*ll!

But despite the largeness, floppies, really small sensor, low megapixel, slight heaviness, it is a digital camera in every way my iPhone is!

And it just feels so incredibly good to pop in a floppy into your camera, for I have always loved those kind of things. It is just good to be able to handle the material instead of never ever seeing you cards. I do miss the time of MC, CD, DVD, MD and all those other abbreviations.

But enough, is enough. Let's start talking about the second part of the title.

How to Sell your Product on eBay or Marktplaats 

I think that next to having proper information about your product on these sites, is to use proper photos. For me as a consumer, my eye is one of the things that needs to be drawn towards the ad in order for me to land on it. The better your photos look, the more people will see your offer. But, please do not use photos from the official website, or something. This does look good, but doesn't give you a lot of faith in the seller or the product. Me it gives the feeling as if something is wrong with the product that the seller doesn't want to show me until I have bought it. Plus if you are selling photography equipment, and the buyer sees that you have taken the photo yourself you must have some skill and are therefore more likely to have taken good care for it (no guarantees though). If you have one flash and another camera you are almost set to go. You only have to look for a nice spot in your home put the product in and take a photograph of it. This can be a white wall, or a piece of paper you curved up against the wall, but shiny surfaces work pretty well as well. As you can see I photographed this product in the middle of our living room and no one would ever have to know. The set that I used to photograph this is a minimal set for location flash photography, but you can easily use a desk light or even a flashlight as well. You can use a sheet of printing paper instead of an umbrella and your friend/girlfriend/boyfriend as a VAL (Voice Activated Lightstand). And just as I did you can use a sheet of printing paper to fill in a little of the light from the right side. You don't even need to own a DSLR or a Olympus Pen (which I used here), or whatever to make this shot, you can even do it using your phone. If I have time I will reproduce the photo using the most basic of equipment I can imagine and do a repost of this post.

If you liked my work on the eBay/Marktplaats bit, please let me know below and I will do a bigger post on that as well!

Hope you had fun reading and learning a bit!

Leave your comments below!

Cheers