Yeesh. Things are starting to look a little iffy in my industry. So far my work has been unaffected by the instability in the markets, but I am beginning to hear from other developers that potential clients are becoming nervy about starting new development projects. Hopefully that won't hit us, but frankly I've been expecting it to. Usually software houses take a hit when the market looks uncertain.

Anyway, I have a lot to do and I am heads down on it. This post (and my previous 3) have been posted via "moblogging"--I send an e-mail to the blog provider and they turn it into a post. Still planning on doing a blogathon on Tuesday November 4 to cover the election. I encourage all my friends to drop me an e-mail with their experiences at polling stations.

Definition of "undercutting":

Me:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120163294055
Starting time: Sep-27-07 19:45:00 PDT (scheduled, so as to begin after other auctions ended)
Starting bid: US $49.99
Duration: 7-day listing

The other guy:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170153862318
Starting time: Sep-27-07 20:27:48 PDT
Starting bid: US $0.89
Duration: 7-day listing

I've been so busy with work and trying to sell cards that I haven't had time to do much photography.  I did get some great pix in Hyannis a couple weeks ago and some more good stuff at a reception for a christening I went to last weekend, but I haven't had time to photoshop the photos, clean them up, organize them, and so forth.  It's just been either work or eBay the last couple weeks.  Here's one picture I took (at the office, of couse).  Somebody in my building went out and got one of those "Dream Cruisers".  Isn't it gorgeous?  Wow.

On the eBay front I continue to sell and sell.  Part of my unlimited set is gone now, and I've gotten the right price for it, and I continue to identify rarities or obscurities in my collection and put them up for sale.  I am happy to report that I am at 90% of stage one and expect to make it there by the end of the week.  Cool beans!

But I have learned one important lesson about selling.  Selling in bulk may allow you to ship more product, but it definitely costs you money.  I sold a set of 8 revised dual lands back on the tenth of September for $122.50.  In preparation for the end of that auction I got another 7 dual lands together and was prepared to sell them as a batch.  But I decided not to.  As an experiment I decided to sell the 7 duals as individual auctions (here they are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).  They went for a total of $139.60.

Sold as a batch, they went for $15.31 apiece.  Sold individually? $19.94.  That's 30% difference!!!  Viewed from that perspective it makes sense to sell individually unless you have a very small market (say you are selling on a table on your front lawn... maybe a couple dozen people swing by and look at the items, chances of selling them all individually are remote.)  But on eBay the market is huge, millions of potential buyers, so go for it right?

Well there *are* the eBay fees to consider.  eBay will charge you for absolutely anything you can think of and plenty of things that wouldn't even occur to you.  Back in the early days of eBay there was a listing fee and a sale fee.  The listing fee used to be 30 cents.  That was it.  Then if the item sold there was a sale fee which was this sliding scale thing that was very complicated but generally worked out to about 4% to 5% of your sale.  Nowadays everything costs money.  No longer is the listing fee flat, but it is based on the minimum bid of your auction.  If your minimum bid is a dollar, the listing fee is 20 cents.  If your minimum bid is $49.99 your listing fee is $1.20, and if your minimum bid is $59.99 the fee is $2.40.  As you can see the fee is determined inside some sort of bracketed structure.  Want to add a reserve price?  You'll be charged 1% of your reserve price.  Want to add a buy-it-now price?  There's a fee for that.  Want to schedule your auction to start later in the day or later in the week?  There's a fee for that.  And so on and so on and so on.  Sale fees aside, eBay takes a hefty chunk out of you up front just for listing the item.  To the point where it makes no sense at all to sell anything for under say, 5 dollars.  Ebay will simply eat so much of it that it becomes pointless to sell it.

And of course once your item sells, eBay charges you for a percentage of the sale price, this you would pay no matter how many items you are selling, but the listing fees are paid for each item.  My listing fees for the first dual land auction was 30 cents (I had no minimum bid, no buy it now).  The 7 individual auctions cost 40 cents apiece to list (probably because I set a minimum bid of $9.99, otherwise it would have been 30 cents).  But that is $2.80 to list 7 individual items instead of 30 cents to list one.

Then come the PayPal fees, which generally work out to about 3.5% of the sale price but which have overhead costs causing them to be at least 30 cents as a minimum.  I read an amusing story about a guy who overcharged his customer about 90 cents for shipping, and offered the customer a refund via PayPal.  So the customer got sixty cents.  Ouch.  For items worth about $20 each, the overhead is not really all that relevant, but it would be for inexpensive items.  The PayPal fees would be easier to stomach if PayPal wasn't owned by eBay.  Yes, that's right, you pay eBay to list your item, you pay eBay to sell your item, and you pay eBay to collect the payment for the sale of your item.  Yeesh.  And, to make it even more annoying, PayPal fees are instantaneously applied to any cash transferred, but eBay fees are simply billed to you at the end of the month.  That way, PayPal can charge you a percentage off of the $100 you were paid, instead of the $100 you were paid minus the eBay listing and sale fees.  I hasten to point out again that PayPal *is* eBay.  Double dipping anyone?

After correcting for eBay listing fees, eBay sale fees, and eBay PayPal fees, the group lot went for $14.20 per card, and the individual lot for $17.80.  That's still a 25% improvement in price, even after being robbed charged for eBay's fine services.  Altogether the 8 auctions sold for $262.10, which isn't bad, even if eBay took $23.92 in total fees.  My state government charges 5% in sales tax.  eBay?  9.13%.  Yikes!!!

So from now on I'm going to sell individually and try not to think about the fact that I might as well just set every tenth item on fire since I'm not going to end up with any money for it.

Looking down the notes/status on my selling/sold auctions, they read like something out of "How to be Obnoxious -- A Practitioner's Guide".  Let's run through them, shall we?

Item 1 is a very rare set which did not sell because some rather clueless sellers all decided to run auctions for the same item at the same time as mine, and undercut me.  As a result they all hurt each other and nobody made what the set was worth.  One guy had an extremely low minimum bid and got no bids.  After his auction ended, there was only one auction left to bid on, it shot way up over the first guy's minimum despite having poorer quality cards.  Thinking about that makes my brain shrivel.  Now I have to wait around for all of these shmoes to finish relisting and selling their sets so I can get a fair price for mine.  And they appear to be waiting for me.  Greaaaaaaat.

Item 2 is my most valuable set, wouldn't sell for 80% of the retail price.  I received the most ridiculous offers, promises from people who then disappeared, and got strung along by people who eventually just backed out as if surprised when I repeated stuff to them which was clearly stated in the auction description.  Meanwhile the auction has had hundreds of views and dozens of people watching it.  I've now relisted (cha-ching! extra ebay fees!) lowered the price to 70% and it still isn't selling.  Jesus.  I'm going to have to split it up and sell it in pieces (cha-ching! more fees!)... and I'll end up making way more than the current asking price.  Had one buyer offer the full price if I would ship to Spain (auction says shipping to USA only.)  He assured me up and down that it was perfectly safe and he does it all the time.  Then I told him that he would have to assume the shipping risk (i.e. item goes missing, he has to wait for the UPS refund, up to 6 months).  And suddenly it's no longer something he feels comfortable doing.  (Guess he doesn't have as much faith in the Spanish courier services after all.)  Currently I have one offer from a guy who "is trying to get the money together".  We'll see... past history is not a good indicator.

Item 3, a set so rare that only a handful exist in the world.  I set a reserve and have people who expect me to sell it to them for one tenth of the reserve.  One bidder offered to buy it for the reserve price, but insists I cancel the auction and relist it with a buy it now option first!!  (For those wondering, it cost about $9 to list it the first time, and would cost another $9 to list it again.)  Guy refuses to just bid the goddamned reserve amount.  I refused to end the auction for him.

Item 4, fixed price/best offer auction.  I accepted an offer of $150, only to discover that the buyer was from Japan (you don't get buyer's location until you accept their offer.)  Auction description says shipping to USA only.  Genius.  I recalculating the shipping charges, and they tripled.  Sent buyer an invoice and pointed out that he should have contacted me first before he bid because that's exactly what the auction description says.  I hope he doesn't back out, but I suspect he will (and I lose $5 in listing fees... cha-ching!)

Item 5, sold Aug-31.  No contact from buyer.  Invoice sent 9/1.  Reminder sent 9/4.  Still no contact.  Standard eBay grace period is 3 days from end of auction.  Going to have to send buyer a warning tomorrow and if he doesn't pay within a day after that it will be negative feedback and relist the item (cha-ching! more listing fees...)

Item 6, shipping to USA only.  Bidder from Germany pleaded with me to ship to him, and eventually I agreed and let him bid.  Then after winning the item he argued with me about the shipping costs and insisted I ship USPS instead of UPS.

Item 7, buyer asked repeatedly about card condition despite pictures of the cards being in auction description, and then took his sweet time getting his payment together after he won (took 5 days to make an instant electronic payment.)  At least he apologized for taking so long.  He'd be the first.

What next???

As you know I am selling some of my MTG collection (the oldest and the bestest stuff) to finance photographic gear.  I spent awhile researching prices so my stuff could be competitively priced--which was a little challenging because for some of the hotter stuff (the Unlimited and Arabian Nights sets) there hasn't been an auction on ebay for months on these items.  I finally figured out why.  Potential sellers are waiting for a price to beat.  After months with very little in the way of complete sets of Unlimited/Arabians, within a day of me listing my sets for auction, a bunch of other sellers crawled out of the woodwork and listed their sets for auction, all undercutting me by small amounts (typically about $50), or by setting high reserves and no minimum bid.  Since all these auctions are now running simultaneously, there is suddenly a lot of options for the prospective buyer, and since mine is ending before the others, the lower-priced auctions are going to see all the action.

So at this point I don't expect the Arabians or Unlimited sets to sell, and now I'm going to have to sit around like the other campers and wait for some other seller to come along so I can undercut him or her.

Pain in the ass.  The amusing thing is, sets this rare sell so infrequently that if a seller waited until my auction was over, he'd end up doing better than he would if they all try to sell at the same time and undercut each other.  Oh well... I guess the buyers win!

So while sitting around yesterday trying to work from home, aching and dealing with my swollen face, I considered the sort of kit I would need to take quality wedding/portraiture photos.

It occurred to me that if I had 10 grand kicking around, I could put together an amazing kit for doing wedding photography and portrait work.  In a moment of idle dreaming I listed it out on Amazon using their "Listmania" service.  You can see it in great detail here. I don't see how I could come up with that kind of dough unless I sold off my collection of Magic: the Gathering trading cards.  It probably wouldn't get me all the way there, but it might get me far enough along to build a useful subset of the gear.

A serious wedding photographer brings a spare camera body on a job--both because the primary camera could break down, and also because it can make switching between lenses much quicker, so I would want a more serious body to be my primary camera and my XTi would be my backup body.  Then I would need a couple high quality zoom lenses and a flash for the new camera.  That would be the basic wedding kit.

In order to do serious portraiture these lenses plus those I already own would probably suffice, but there is a little more equipment I would need for portraiture, and there is at least one additional lens that would be nice to have for the wedding work, and some flash enhancements that would be good for both:

The 16-35 lens gives me serious wide angle capability for large family shots (not unusual for weddings) and I can use it for landscape work when I am shooting for pleasure.  The muslin backdrop, support system, and clamps would be necessary for decent portrait shots, and ultimately I would probably want a few varieties of muslin backdrop, but for starting out, basic black would be fine.  The OC-E3 would allow me to separate the flash from the camera and hold it overhead or mount it nearby, and the LightSphere would let me diffuse the flash for softer lighting.  Stage two brings the total pricetag to $7,720.  This would be a solid wedding/portrait kit.

The only thing lacking is an even longer lens for very special sorts of situations, and a quality backup lens for the XTi body if I am ever shooting with an assistant and we both need to be in the most common shooting range (20's-70's) at the same time.  That's where stage three comes in:

The 400mm L glass with image stabilization should provide the last conceivable bit of reach necessary for weddings and I suspect for most weddings it wouldn't be necessary.  However it would be a solid lens for wildlife when I am not shooting weddings.  The 28-75mm Tamron gets a lot of respect despite the brand and the price, and as a backup lens on the XTi body, that would be fine.  This brings the total pricetag to $9,509 and gives me enough glass to do almost anything I want.  Yes, there's no extreme length lenses (> 400 mm) but I can't conceive of a use for such lenses that could justify the expense.

The glass listed would cover me for macro, wildlife, weddings, landscape, low light, sports, and portraits (especially when you include the 28mm, 50mm, and 90mm primes I already own).  Looking toward specialty landscape and architectural photography, the only other thing I can think of that would be "nice to have" would be a fisheye lens and a perspective-correcting lens.  That would be the "bonus stage":

The fisheye lens lets you squeeze a lot of lanscape into a single shot by giving the shot a spherized look... here's an example taken with the EF 15mm fisheye.  A tilt-shift lens is a strictly manual focus lens that allows you shift the focal plane in order to correct the perspective and distortion that often results from shooting tall structures from relatively nearby with short focal length lenses.  Here's a sample shot with the TS-E 24mm.  Anyway this would put the pricetag at $11,188, but what a killer kit this would be!!  Ah well... if I win the lottery someday... fun to think about I suppose.

If I sell off my MTG collection and save up my pennies for awhile, the basic wedding kit becomes a distinct possibility. I'll be devoting some serious thought to that over the coming days.

Personally, I am sick of online cosmetics ads that show two side by side "before and after" photos of the miraculous effect of the product on wrinkles or age spots or whatever.  Usually both pictures are photoshopped, or at least the "after" photo is.  Today I saw one that at least had the decency to announce in (extremely small type) that these were "simulated images, not actual photos".

It strikes me that these annoying adverts do a better job of advertising Photoshop than they do of advertising the beauty cream or whatever.  So to that end, I made this parody of a webvertisement I saw for "BodyShape" while I was reading a news article today:

So folks, go out and get some Photoshop by Adobe, and you can have a creamy smooth ass too ... at least in your digital photo album.