My family, friends and acquaintences pretty much all know that I get a lot of mileage out of eBay, even though it's not what it used to be (but what is anyway). It's just a great place to find stuff, especially hard to find stuff! And, at times, I've used it as a virtual garage sale to get rid of things that are either piling up or I just don't need any more. However, moving to the city (vs. living in Lubbock) has been a revelation in terms of what can be done with Craig's List. We use it all the time for any variety of things such as a secondary refridgerator for the garage, to getting somebody to take an old, big and broken projection TV away so I could park in the garage again!
But this isn't a post to extol the virtues of either eBay or Craig's List, but on how the interaction between the two can be made to work for you.... or in this case, me. As the regular reader (or readers if there is more than one now), know, I've been on this "Strobist" kick lately, trying learn how to control photographic lighting by using some small flash units from off-camera and acquiring all the necessary parts to do this wirelessly. And in this effort, I've used my frugal philosophy to acquire some old and cheap Sunpak flashes and a set of wireless triggers that originally came off of eBay, but which i bought from a Craig's List ad for less than $50. So with the eBay flashes, Craig's List triggers, and garage sale tripods, I had a rudimentary sub-$100 "strobist" rig. Not a good one, not a powerful one, but a cheap one!
So, I'm done right? Move on, shoot lots of nicely lit family pictures and "call it a day". Nope, not by a long shot! There's always the never-finished quest to "upgrade": in this case, upgrade to the flash units that David "the Strobist" Hobby recommends as being the most powerful and flexible for the money... Nikon strobes....specifically the SB-26 (and possibly current models like SB-600, and SB-800). Unfortunately, not only are these things expensive since they are made by the "hand-of-Thor" otherwise known as Nikon, but since David Hobby started his blog, all the best Nikon strobes for remote function have become eBay gold! So the price of the SB-24s & 25s are typically around $90-110 and the "holy grail", SB-26 (with the built-in optical slave function) goes for somthing like $125 or more.
This is where eBay is really useful as a research tool on current market conditions. So after a few days of looking on eBay in both "live" as well as "completed" auctions, I was able to determine what the typical selling price of those flashes run and what the range of price fluctuations tend be as well. Meaning that, if you want an SB-26 (holy grail remember?), you pretty much have to expect to pay over $100 unless you are phenominally lucky. Therefore, with that piece of information in hand, I kept an eye on the local Craig's List..... and "loe and behold", an SB-26 appears one day with an asking price of $50! You wanna bet I jump all over that and drove my happy little butt up to Plano (45 min.) and picked that puppy up that afternoon!?! About a week and a half later, I found an SB-600 (current model Nikon flash) on CL for $175. It was in Ft. Worth, but I got the guy to take the transaction through PayPal and ship it to me for $5.
In the end, this post isn't all about how you can get a good deal on Craig's List and that eBay costs more. It's really more an illustration that if you know what the market is (based on a relatively stable entity..eBay), then you know when a REALLY good price is there for the taking. In the first case; it was pretty extreme. I got a really nice flash unit for anywhere from 30 to 40% of the market price. In the second case, it was about a 20 to 25 % discount which is nothing to be sneered at these days. But the main thing is that, by using information from both, I was able to upgrade to much nicer flash units than what I had to start with. AND, I'll be able to do the same thing I did with the D70, where I took my old equipment and sell it for quite probably more than I gave for it to start with and thus defraying the costs of upgrading even more!
All my Hi-Tech Blogging has been temporarily interrupted by some unexpected car buying! I might have to write about that experience, but not today.
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