If you are upgrading your camera gear, horray for you! That also means you’re probably planning to convert your old camera to cash for new gear or at least to free up room in your camera bag.

Camera bodies are probably the most difficult piece of photo equipment to sell, since new bodies and technology are released very frequently. They lack the longevity of lenses and depreciate over time.

We’ve posted a few previous tips about buying used DSLR gear and buying pro camera gear on a student budget, but now we’ll shift gears to the seller’s standpoint.

1. Think local — really local.

Selling your own camera gear can feel a little like selling an old project car.  It’s easy to become sentimentally attached, and you want to make sure it goes into good hands.

Before posting your gear advertisements anywhere, see if anyone in your immediate social circle is interested in buying. Co-workers or fellow students tend to be a good bet.  When I was working at my college paper, a lot of photo department staff would sell gear to each other, with the comforting reassurance that their equipment would be put to good use. There is also an added level of trust within colleagues, since they already know you and you’ll spend less time having to convince them that what you’re selling is in good condition.

Craigslist, when used with caution, is also a good way to find local buyers. Be wary of scams, though — a lot of falsely interested “buyers” might email you with a strange proposal. I’ve gotten a few generic emails from people interested in “the item,” offer a higher payment via PayPal, and then ask you to ship it to some remote relative in Africa. Yeah, right.

If you do find a real, local buyer on craigslist, do be careful. Propose to meet in a safe, public place during the day, and bring a friend or two along for added security. Cash is always most reliable, as well. It might be a good idea to meet near your bank, so you can safely stow your cash after you’ve made a sale.

2. Advertise the basics.

You don’t need to go into detail about small wear and tear that you notice, or anything beyond the camera’s model and maybe highlight some important technical specifications like megapixels and frames per second.

It is helpful to post a link with more detailed camera specs, either from the manufacturer’s site or dpreview.com, for the buyer’s convenience.

But the bottom line is to cut to the chase and don’t let your advert be hunkered down by unnecessary details.

Just tell them, it’s a Nikon D200. 10 megapixels. 5 fps. Excellent condition. Body specs here.

The less you tell prospective, but serious buyers, the more they might want to respond to your ad with questions. Once you begin a discussion with them, that’s your chance to answer more detailed questions they might have.

3. Don’t include more than you have to in the box.

Naturally, you’ll need to include a battery, charger, and other accessories that came with the camera body, but avoid including interchangeable accessories that you might use in the future.

Michael mentioned in his gear on a student budget post that he made the mistake of including a high-end B&W filter with a lens he sold, but later realized he still needed it.

Hang on to those memory cards and filters.

4. On the other hand, you’ll have a better chance of selling it if you bundle it with a lens.

Though this is a bit of a contradiction to the previous tip, but buyers will be much more interested in purchasing a used body if it comes with a lens.

You probably will not make as much back on the resell, but if the market is dry and people just aren’t interested, a lens can add a great deal of buyer incentive.

However, whether you need to include a lens or not really depends on what kind of camera body you are selling.

If you are selling a professional body, chances are, your buyers will be pros as well, and are likely to have their own lenses. In this case, there’s no need to include a lens.

If you are selling a lower-end DSLR, like a Nikon D40 or a Canon Rebel, prospective buyers are probably newer to photography, and will likely be looking for a bundle kit.

There’s really no need to K.I.T. with your kit lens, especially if you’re selling the body it came with. Ask yourself: are you really likely to attach that plastic 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 on your brand new D3x? Probably not.

Selling kit lenses alone is pretty pointless as well; brand new, they’re worth less than $150.

Instead, include it with the body you’ve got up for sale, and readjust your price. Be sure to check the street value of your bundle on eBay and craigslist.

5. Include your own photos of your gear on your advertisement.

If you provide photos with your advertisement, people are more likely to click on your posting. Additionally, if those photos are noticeably different from the standard manufacturer’s product shots, they can add to a feeling of authenticity and openness on the seller’s side. Also, when you post attractive product photos, the photos can imply your own skill as a photographer, and can give you more clout as a camera seller.

Conclusion

Understand the buyer’s standpoint when selling. Check out Michael’s posts on buying used DSLR gear and buying pro camera gear on a student budget.  Don’t sell yourself short, but be aware that you may need to make some concessions in order to make your gear marketable.

Finally, if you’ve got any additional tips on selling gear, feel free to share it with us!

fotojournal is a new photoblogging service by Canadian company Robot Republic geared towards professional photographers, allowing them to showcase their work in a blog format.

They just had their launch party a couple days ago, and the pay-as-you-go service will soon be fully open to the public (they’re currently in invite-only private beta). No word on what their pricing model is.

The site is well designed, and allows you to display your photographs in various templates without requiring HTML knowledge. Among the templates is one that features your photographs at a large Big Picture-esque resolution:

The photo hosting and sharing space is chock-full of competition, but fotojournal might be able to find a niche with its clean design and flexible format.

Facebook recently announced that it has increased the maximum size of photographs from 604 pixels to 720 pixels, a difference of 19.2%. They posted the above photograph showing the relative difference in size.

While this is pretty exciting news for those of you who upload your photographs to Facebook (how many of you are there, really?), this is actually a much bigger deal for the company that most people probably realize. With a 20% increase in the size of photograph they allow, they increase their storage demands by at least 20%.

20% for a smaller photo sharing service might not be too significant, but for Facebook it’s a huge change. Why? Because Facebook is the most popular photo sharing service on the web. We’re talking billions of photographs per month, and petabytes of total storage. Just how much data is a petabyte? Check out this neat infographic by Mozy.

Don’t worry though. Facebook’s revenues are expected to be up to $2 billion this year.

P.S. Did we mention we love the prefix “peta”?

Adobe has just announced that the Photoshop.com Mobile application is now available to third-party developers to integrate into their own applications.

[...] take for example a “sell-your-home-fast” application that allowed you to upload pictures and descriptions of your home to some web site that will advertise your home to millions of people all over the planet. Now imagine that this “sell-your-home-fast” application allowed you to not only snap and upload pictures – but also edit those pictures so that your home looks its very, very best. Well now that scenario is possible – all the “sell-your-home-fast” developer needs to do is use standard Android APIs to incorporate the Photoshop.com Mobile editor into their application.

By doing this, Adobe is trying to assert its software as the de facto standard for mobile image editing, allowing it to have a bigger control over things like interoperability and file types. It’s a lesson well learned from Adobe Acrobat and the PDF.

Luis Caldevilla creates beautiful time-lapse videos and publishes them to his website, timelapses.tv. He recently received his 1 millionth video view, and created this montage video to celebrate the occasion. It can give you quite a few ideas for things to make time-lapses of.

If you’re looking for a way to “upgrade” your flash unit without spending money on real gear, the Los Angeles Digital Imaging Group (LADIG) has a nice bounce card cutout you can use to create your own free bounce card. Simply download the template (link to PDF below), print it out on cardstock, follow the instructions for cutting, and attach it to your flash with a rubber band (or velcro if you’re feeling fancy).

Download the Whacky Hack Bounce Card PDF (via Make)

Image credit: Photograph by Adam Flaherty and used with permission

Lord Carlile, the official reviewer of terrorism legislation in the UK, has begun calling for the abolition of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial stop and search law that allows police to search individuals without having reasonable suspicion has become the bane of many street photographers, who are often ordered to stop shooting and are detained when uncooperative.

In January, over 2,000 photographers gathered in Trafalgar Square in London to protest Section 44, and apparently the negative publicity has gotten the attention of the government. The London evening standard reported yesterday that Carlile has begun calling for the act to be repealed:

Lord Carlile of Berriew said the use of Section 44 powers was having a “disproportionately bad effect on community relations” and had become “counter-productive” in the fight against terrorism.

He also revealed that not a single arrest for terrorism offences and only “morsels” of intelligence had resulted from more than 200,000 such searches carried out last year — 151,000 in the Metropolitan Police area alone.

He suggests that the new law should allow searches without reasonable suspicion to be carried out only during terrorist events or around a small number of sites critical to the countries infrastructure.

What we found interesting was the following quote:

Nothing fills my in-tray and in-box more than complaints on the use of Section 44.

Well photographers, your voices were heard!

(via Amateur Photographer)

Image credit: ‘Im a Photographer not a Terrorist’ by =chris=

Flixtime is a website launched recently by Stock photography service Fotolia that helps you easily transform your photos, videos, and text into short 60-second flash video clips.

Creating a video requires an account, and you can choose to either use your own photographs, or stock photographs provided by Fotolia. Once the video is created, you can either share it online or download it to your computer. Generic animations can be added to your video, which can be saved in a large number of video formats.

If you need to create a short video clip for whatever reason, Flixtime is a pretty fast way to get it done.

About a week ago at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Russ Beinder caught a Sports Illustrated photographer at the hockey rink with a pretty interesting gear setup:

I think this is David Klutho uberphotog from Sports Illustrated. He has what appears to be two Nikon D700 cameras “glued” together with a 24-70mm f/2.8G attached. I am guessing there is some custom eletronics to synchronize the exposure and focus between the two. The little black box on the camera on the right has a cable running in one side and out the other. It has a simple toggle switch and what appears to be a indicator light. He was taking shots into the crowd.

Here’s the original shot by Beinder:

He also notes that David Klutho has previously published a 3D photography book.

Does anyone know if you can buy the setup that allows the two cameras to be controlled simultaneously?

Image credit: 3D Camera by Russ Beinder and used with permission

It’s a tough job market in New York, and even Spider-Man has difficulty finding job security these days.

In this month’s issues #623 and #624 of Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man comic, Peter Parker loses his job as the photographer for the mayor — former Daily Bugle EIC J. Jonah Jameson.

According to Marvel, Petey has to make a troubling decision between freedom of press or withholding certain information from the media in order to protect a friend, but his decision costs him his job.

Peter Parker has always been a bit of an everyman, often beset with real problems in a real city, on top of the occasional super villain encounter. Parker has had to deal with marital problems, finding freelance gigs,  and dealing with the deaths of loved ones.

And now he faces every photog’s worst fear: having a smeared reputation. On top of being able to afford to web-sling through the city, let alone keep an apartment, he now has the daunting task of trying to find a job. Yikes.

This guy just can’t catch a break!