Shooting for Dollars: Simple Photo Techniques for Greater eBay Profits

This is a good book and should be on the shelf of anyone who is going to have a go at eBay for a living. I give it four stars only because most of the information is available on the web.

Found the information to be well organized and useful. The illustrations and directions are easy to understand, even for a novice photographer. Dana

I got this book a nights ago and read a few pages a night. Then a few minutes ago I went on-line to e-Bay looking for a RAID controller for my web server. The picture of the first unit was so dark that it almost looked like a big black blob. The image was way underexposed. You can see exactly what I'm talking about in the center picture on page 62. The second unit had a picture taken using a flash. It was a straight on shot that caused the light from the flash to bounce straight back at the camera. The entire center of the item was pure white from the reflected light. All you could see was the few items at each end of the card. You can see exactly what I'm talking about in the picture on page 91 of this book. A little simple math. To shoot either pictures of the RAID controllers would take say a minute. To shoot a much better picture might take three minutes. That's two additional minutes. Let's say that the better picture caused the item to sell for $5 more. That's $5 for two minutes. That's equivalent to $150 an hour. That's pretty good pay. There are lots of good books on photography. This one talks about the standard photographic stuff, but explains in simple terms how it will help sell the item on e-Bay.

As a long-time eBay seller who's taken too many photos to mention, the hints in this book are helping us to re-work our photo set up. I recommend this highly to anyone who has to take photos for eBay or any other web site on which they sell products.

Step back for a moment and consider this. Just a few years ago, the very idea of an online auction site that anyone could use would have been pure science fiction. Then along came eBay. Now we have this book, which is not even about the general experience of selling or buying on eBay, but just on taking photos of items you want to sell. Talk about specialised! Yet the authors have a very valid point. It has been recognised that having a well taken photo, or several photos, of an auction item can tangibly boost the number of bids and ultimately the final price. [Quite independently of this book, there have been studies of eBay auctions that have quantified this effect.] To this ends, the book gives many tips as to optimising those images. Having a well lit object, perhaps in a pleasing background. Or sometimes, if an object can be scanned using a flatbed scanner, doing that instead of using a camera. Certainly, a scanner is usually easier and quicker to use. So when should you do so? The authors' judgment about the esthetics of the photos seems pretty good. While you might quibble about a few of their assessments, it's mostly very common sense.