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Used camera nightmares: Avoiding used photography gear horror

Nov 18, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Many of us have had a horror story or two from purchasing used camera gear. Here are some scary stories, but also some tips on how to minimize your chances of this happening to you.

Purchasing used

I purchase a lot of items used, not just photography gear. I have never purchased a new car. I sometimes purchase clothing, tools, musical equipment, audio recording equipment, and furniture used. It’s typically in great shape. I clean everything thoroughly and test it just to be sure.

However, every once in a while, it does not go your way. I’ve been rather lucky. Others, not so much.

Rattle rattle, clunk clunk!

Pentax K-1 and 15-30mm f/2.8 lens, both purchased second-hand for significantly less than their new price. The camera survived rattling around in an unpadded cardboard box. I am still using it several years later!

After several months of searching for a used Pentax K-1 Mk I DSLR camera, I found a private party on Amazon selling a used one. As a bonus, it came with a Pluto trigger and seven or eight batteries.

When the shipment came, my excitement turned to anxiety. All the contents were loose, and everything was shifting around in the package. I immediately grabbed my camera phone and started taking photos as I unboxed it. The camera was thinly layered in bubble wrap. However, the box was considerably larger than the camera and had no padding.

Worse, all the batteries were loose, rattling around inside the box!

To my surprise, everything worked. I tested everything for several days. While I am lucky that I got something for a great price, this could have been a disaster.

Cuh-raaaack!

I didn't smash this lens just for a Photofocus article on horror stories. No, in fact, this is not a photo. It's a Firefly AI-generated image. — I didn’t smash this lens just for a Photofocus article on horror stories. No, in fact, this is not a photo. It’s a Firefly AI-generated image.

Many horror stories seem to center around packaging. I have had friends who have had their camera lens arrive in the cardboard box with no packing material. In all instance, the front element was cracked or scratched. One of my friends found the front element completely detached from the lens.

“Hey, where’s my money?”

Some of you may have heard of Jennifer Khordi. She is a photographer who sold her camera to someone using Venmo in January 2018. She received a message from Venmo that her bank transfer has been initiated. Great, right?

Not for long. Her transaction failed. Venmo froze her account later.

The man and the camera? Nowhere to be seen.

Venmo later confirmed that she had been the victim of a scam.

However, at this point we do not offer any buyer or seller protections: this is why we prohibit merchant transactions on Venmo (per section B.1.b. of our User Agreement).”

Things were looking grim for Khordi.

A happy ending

Thankfully, due to Khordi submitting the camera’s serial number to numerous camera stores, the scammer was apprehended by B&H Camera Store security.

B&H had paid the man $1800 for Khordi’s DSLR. However, the camera store incurred the loss and returned the camera to Khordi.

And now, a fantastic segue from those horror stories

Since we’re discussing B&H, now is the perfect time to discuss how to minimize packaging horrors and scams. One sure thing is that when you purchase from these retailers, you can be really sure that you will not receive your camera and batteries bouncing around inside an unpadded box.

B&H

I would never overlook B&H for used photography gear. They are a large second-hand tech seller that is headquartered in New York City. Visiting there is almost a rite of passage for photographers on the East Coast. B&H have large inventories of used items. They go through and inspect the equipment carefully. And as you might expect, they’re quite good at packaging their items.

MPB

Of course, there’s also places like MPB. Large places such as this inspect the equipment carefully. Some of them, such as MPB or KEH, also have repair facilities. And most places have warranties on their used items, such as MPB’s six-month warranty.

Like B&H, MPB sells not only cameras and lenses, but also remote controls, batteries, battery grips, charging cases, drones, camcorders and more. For each product, they provide an assessment of the condition, what’s in the box, and a warranty. If you want, you can lower the cost by trading in some of your old gear. They are very thorough with evaluating used equipment. However, that’s one aspect that makes them a good place to purchase used gear.

They go through all the gear, clean it up and then sell it. And you get to see a photo of the actual piece of gear you are purchasing. They also service their warranties in-house. They have a five-star review on Trustpilot with tens of thousands of reviews. Chances are, they’re doing something right.

Convenience and safety

If you want convenience and want to maximize your chances of purchasing used gear that works like new, purchasing from places such as these is the way to go.

I’ve purchased cameras, tripods, camera bags, cases, lights, flashes, lenses, photography books, and more – all used. Over time, I’ve saved thousands of dollars. And that’s a beautiful thing.

More thoughts on purchasing second-hand

If you want to read more on purchasing cameras used, you may want to read Getting great cameras for cheap: Buying used. And of course, if you want to read about the Best places for purchasing used camera equipment, you’ll want to click on that. And while you’re at it, consider reading Top 3 second-hand camera gear picks for savvy photographers.

Do you have any horror stories to share? Do you have some tips on how to purchase second-hand gear safely?

Above: These are gratuitous and vaguely ominous long exposure night photos. I used my second-hand gear to create these photos, but otherwise, they have little to do with the article. Wheee!

apple presents ‘I remember you’ paris photography exhibition, exclusively shot on iPhone 15

Nov 18, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Apple presents ‘I remember you’ photo exhibition in Paris

On November 10, 2023, tech giant Apple presented I Remember You, a two-day photography exhibition in Paris’ Salon Corderie. Exclusively shot on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the show featured works from five photographers hailing from diverse corners of the world: Malin Fezehai from New York/Nairobi, Karl Hab from Paris, Vivien Liu from Hong Kong, Mika Ninagawa from Tokyo, and Stefan Ruiz from New York. The works on view were unified by a theme of nostalgia and resilient empowerment to immortalize moments just as they are meant to be cherished. From vivid floral landscapes to black-and-white urban vistas and intimate portraits, the exhibition transforms life’s ephemeral instances into timeless memories.

I Remember You: Photography Exhibition — Mika Ninagawa | image by BFA | Pierrick Rocher

preserving memories through the iPhone 15

The exhibition by Apple (fiind more here) invites photographers to illustrate the power of perspective in storytelling. It highlights the chance we possess to preserve our experiences by capturing the world through our individual viewpoints. In this way, the show poses thought-provoking questions: How do we wish to remember what we love? How can we craft a visual capsule for our world’s greatest treasures, ensuring they are remembered just as we experienced them?

Curatorial advisor Isolde Brielmaier came up with the idea of centering the exhibition around the iPhone camera. As we navigate through life nowadays, the camera in our pocket becomes an extension of our gaze, documenting memories and archiving our lived experiences. This intimate and familiar lens serves as a unique way to view our lives. To encapsulate the sense of nostalgia and everyday moments, the artists used the iPhone 15 Pro Max — to find more about its standout features, see designboom’s previous coverage here. The deliberate choice of this medium empowered artists to transcend the boundaries of their commercial and editorial pursuits, providing a space for playful creation within a theme that is both retrospective and meaningful.

I Remember You: Photography Exhibition — Mika Ninagawa | image by BFA | Pierrick Rocher

Mika Ninagawa

I Remember You: Photography Exhibition | image by BFA | Pierrick Rocher

Stefan Ruiz

I Remember You: Photography Exhibition | image by BFA | Pierrick Rocher

InspiRED, by Kodansha with Stefan Bajcetic: Meet the lover of chess, photography and independence

Nov 18, 2023 By Admin in Photography

He was a shining light through a season with its fair share of difficult moments.

But his positive outlook and patience would be required again when that breakthrough campaign was cut short in March due to a stress response around his adductor.

He can vividly recall the feeling when the news that he was facing a long-term absence was broken to him.

“Because I had the same injury before but in the other side, when I was getting the pain, I kind of thought about that it was going to be the same,” Bajcetic says. “But in my mind it was like, ‘It can’t be the same, I need to keep playing.’

“But I did a scan. Scans are very cruel – they always show something. I remember I was at home, they rang me and they told me, ‘You have a stress response.’

“Obviously it was a tough moment but I kind of took it well, I think. I took it as an opportunity to get stronger, improve in some bits. I just tried to stay positive mentally.”

Of course, there were challenging periods during his lengthy rehabilitation.

The Bajcetic that entered the training ground would often be staring out of the windows in the gym, frustratingly watching his teammates train.

“You can’t stop thinking of what I would have done in that moment, I could obviously be doing that,” he says. “So it’s obviously tough. It’s just getting to the gym and counting the days to going back.”

He is now working his way back to full fitness after another injury setback. But once fit again, his ambitions are high in a second full season around a senior environment.

That said, he is humble enough to know that his development, on and off the pitch, is far from complete.

Sea Creatures From the Deep, Captured in Glass, Rise at Mystic Seaport

Nov 18, 2023 By Admin in Native

A new show of marine invertebrates, modeled in Germany nearly 150 years ago, helps tell a story about the Connecticut coast today.

An enterprising father and son in Dresden, Germany, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, found success in the 19th century hand-blowing glass models of marine invertebrates and selling them to universities and natural history museums around the world, from New England to Tokyo. Harvard and Cornell bought around a thousand, in total, by mail order in the 1870s and 1880s.

As it turns out, many of those same types of invertebrates were also traveling the world — and they still are, transported by maritime traffic, clinging to the hulls of ships and riding in their ballasts. Some of those native European creatures, modeled in glass long before terms like invasive species and biofouling were coined, are now thriving in Stonington Harbor in the Mystic River Estuary, off the coast of Connecticut.

Those well-traveled species are the inspiration behind “Spineless: A Glass Menagerie of Blaschka Marine Invertebrates” at the Mystic Seaport Museum nearby, through Sept. 2024. Included in the rare loan of more than 40 delicate Blaschka models, mostly from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, are several whose pesky counterparts are blanketing nearby docks and pilings.

The Cylista ornata sea anemone rendered in glass.President and Fellows of Harvard College; Joe Michael

It’s the first time that the Blaschka models have been given so much historical context, from 19th-century sailors’ journals and jars of preserved specimen to zoological illustrations that informed the Blaschkas. The museum even included a few related contemporary art works.

“It’s a way for us to authentically talk about ocean health within our mission and within our site,” Christina Brophy, senior vice president of curatorial affairs at the Mystic Seaport Museum, said while sitting out on one of its sunny decks last month. The largest maritime museum in the United States, it’s better known for whaling vessels than ecological research. But one of the show’s curators, James T. Carlton, director emeritus of the Williams-Mystic Coastal & Ocean Studies Program of Williams College and the Mystic museum, has been scraping ship hulls since 1982 and cataloging his findings to record the area’s changing biodiversity.

Krystal Rose, one of the show’s curators, scraping sea creatures off the hull of a schooner that the museum hauled out of the water this past summer. The abundance of nonnative species in the Mystic River estuary inspired the exhibition, which includes glass models of sea squirts found on the ship.Joe Michael/Mystic Seaport Museum

The Blaschka glass models are fragile and rarely travel. But the museum was able to secure a wide variety, including sea anemones, octopuses, squids, tube worms and sea squirts.

“We were looking for species that had both a local story and a global story, species that have been spread around the world by ships for centuries,” said Carlton, who collaborated with the museum’s curator of collections, Krystal Rose.

In an era before scuba diving, underwater cameras, or mass-produced textbooks, the Blaschkas’ lifelike sea creatures were the gold standard of marine zoology teaching models. Invertebrates could not be taxidermied, and collected specimen lose their color and form when preserved in jars, as we can see from the many on view here, including some dating to the 19th century.

The glass artist Steffen Dam’s “Marine Specimen Collection,” 2008, one of several contemporary artworks in the exhibition.Joe Michael/Mystic Seaport Museum

Leopold (1822—95) and Rudolf (1857–1939) offered around 700 marine invertebrate species, which they sold through catalogs like Ward’s Natural Science Establishment of Rochester, N.Y. Created by the process of lampworking — glass blowing using an open flame — and then painstakingly hand-painted, the models were designed to look more realistic than beautiful. But they are works of art, with their multiple layers of glass and fine frills, fringes, suckers and tentacles. (They rarely appear on the market but a Portuguese man o’war brought around $13,000, and a jellyfish, around $20,000, at a Christie’s London auction in 2019.)

“They were a more or less accurate rendering of the species,” said James Hanken, a professor in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, who spearheaded the cleaning, restoration, and display of that institution’s 434 Blaschka models in the early 2000s, after finding them stored away in dusty boxes.

“The Blaschkas were very, very, specific about their parts,” said Elizabeth Brill, a glassworker and marine biology field technician who restored Harvard’s collection (and Cornell’s before that). “They knew exactly how long each tentacle should be, from one species of jellyfish to the next.” Brill restored the one jellyfish on view, which is missing some of its fragile tentacles (replicated by the Blaschkas by coating wires in glass).

The Blaschkas’ glass model of Aplysia argus, a gastropod mollusk known as the white speckled sea hare.President and Fellows of Harvard College; Photo by Joe Michael

Leopold, who hailed from Bohemian glassworkers, started out making jewelry and then glass eyeballs both for humans and taxidermy. He also made stunning glass flowers, producing more than 4,000 with his son for Harvard. What’s surprising is that these two artists in landlocked Dresden could have replicated marine species so accurately.

Leopold did in fact glimpse live jellyfish in all their glass-like luminosity years before he started making them, while sailing across the Atlantic to the U.S. in the early 1850s. By the late 1870s he and his son had acquired a seawater aquarium and ordered live animals that came wrapped in seaweed from marine stations throughout Europe. (Much of what we know of them comes from their archives at the Corning Museum of Glass.)

Zoological illustrations were also essential. Early on, Leopold emulated drawings of anemones by Philip Henry Gosse, the Victorian naturalist and collector of marine species known as the inventor of the modern aquarium (and for trying to reconcile his creationist beliefs with his scientific findings). Later, the Blaschkas borrowed illustrations from Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist and skilled artist who cataloged many of the thousands of marine species pulled up by the HMS Challenger, a British ship that spent three and a half years, starting in 1872, gathering data from the ocean’s depths.

“There was so much documentation of marine invertebrates in the 19th century,” Rose said. “Citizen scientists were walking the shores noticing these things.”

The Blaschkas were heavily influenced by the sketches of the naturalist and artist Ernst Haeckel. A page from his renowned book “Art Forms in Nature” (published in 1904) shows sea anemones. Photomechanical print of lithograph by Adolf Giltsch after sketch by Ernst Haeckel. Library of Congress

This escalating fascination with the sea helped fuel the Blaschkas’ success, “along with Darwin’s publication of the ‘Origin of Species’ and explorations going to all kinds of places,” Hanken said.

With those explorations, of course, came marine creatures as invasive as the humans leading them.

The exhibition includes several models of invasive sea squirts, or tunicates, named for the leathery tunic-like sheath that protects their soft bodies. They tend to grow in clusters and create a slimy blanket that can befoul aquaculture and create drag on ship hulls. And then there are the living ecosystems they disturb.

“We generally don’t like to see invaders,” Carlton told me while watching recent video footage of some of the sea squirts swaying in the tidal surge in nearby Stonington Harbor, where they blanket docks and pilings. “They could replace or displace a native species. And it might have a cascade effect.” The most visible, lightbulb sea squirts, named for their translucent white tubelike forms that seem to glow, are native to Europe but were discovered in Long Island Sound in the early 2000s. The Blaschkas’ version is encased nearby and shows three colorless glass tubes sprouting from a base, each filled with tiny glass coils that seem like precursors of fluorescent light bulbs.

Native to Europe, lightbulb sea squirts — Clavelina lepadiformis — now blanket docks in Stonington Harbor off the coast of Connecticut.Joe Michael/Mystic Seaport Museum

The Blaschkas’ models brought attention to the ocean’s changing biodiversity when a Cornell professor, Drew Harvell, set off on a scuba diving journey in 2013 to see how many live versions of the Blaschkas’ models she could locate. Coral reefs damaged by pollution, blast fishing and ocean warming were among her finds. A book and film documented the project.

Warming waters are also enabling nonnative species to survive where they previously could not, Carlton said. What we can do, as individuals, he said, is “try to clean as well as possible whatever we’re moving or transporting” that might have associated species tagging along.

Once again, “our eyes on the shore are citizen scientists,” Rose said, pulling up an app on her phone, inaturalist, a nonprofit organization that’s building a crowdsourced database detailing where and when living things appear. “Anyone can report a species sighting, and then it gets confirmed by others,” she said. Carlton added, “one step ahead of science.”

In pictures: photographers shortlisted for Portrait of Britain Awards

Nov 18, 2023 By Admin in Photography

By Vanessa Pearce

BBC News, West Midlands

Diversity, empathy and authenticity are all depicted in images shortlisted for this year’s Portrait of Britain, organisers say.

Photos from across the West Midlands feature among the 200 shortlisted portraits and accompanying book that make up the nation’s biggest photography exhibition.

They include images of Herefordshire cobbler, Nick Turner, who was advised never to work alone when he left college, and recently celebrated 36 years in business – working alone.

A community project to improve a neighbourhood in Stoke-on-Trent also features, as does a father pictured in his Coventry back garden.

From the shortlist, 100 winners will be chosen whose photographs will go on display on digital advertising screens located in high streets, shopping centres and transport hubs across the country.

The images capture “the quirky, the mundane, the here and now of the extraordinary everyday in which we live,” said Mick Moore, chief executive of the British Journal of Photography, which runs the competition.

The 200 shortlisted images feature in the Portrait of Britain Vol 6 photo book, printed in collaboration with Bluecoat Press and sponsored by JCDecaux.

Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk

Drowning in Plastic – this is my critical photographic view on modern society

Nov 18, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Photography holds the power to awaken the mind, ignite curiosity and deliver strong messages through artistic imagery. That is precisely the purpose of this still created by photographer Peter East-Hall, who used a surreal approach to reflect upon the issue of consumerism prevailing in the world today.

“Before taking this image, I was talking to the conceptual artist Lorrain Mailer about her installations, which focus on environmental responsibility,” he said.

“We spoke about how plastic is so widely used and is going to be in our environment for much longer than its use. This photograph relates to this topic, addressing how the extensive use of plastic is getting into the ecosystem, even into our bloodstream, and the consequent impact on our environment. I wanted the photograph to be dramatic, thought-provoking and visceral.

“I live near the English Channel, so we didn’t have to go far to find a location for this art installation. The shingle beach at Dungeness combined with the undisturbed sky offered the ideal background – it was a one-shot opportunity, the right weather, clouds and light.

We used plastic from some packaging and my husband was the model. The wind was perfect that day, breathing life into the plastic material and adding dynamic movement and structure. However, the wind also presented a few challenges. We didn’t want the plastic to be blown into the sea, so we had to work with the wind. To bring out the texture, light and folds of the plastic, I changed the image from color to black-and-white in Lightroom.”

Peter East-Hall

Peter Easthall is a photographer and a member of the Societies of Photographers and the Ashford Visual Artists. He lives on Romney Marsh, near the village of Lydd on Sea in England, and has been passionate about photography since childhood. Peter enjoys creating art from his images and collaborating with other artists, taking inspiration from nature and often capturing things that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Tech details

Camera: Nikon D3400
Lens: Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR
Aperture: f/6.3
Shutter speed: 1/250 sec
ISO: 200
Focal length: 55mm

You might be interested in the best cameras for black and white photography, as well as these Lightroom tutorials and free Lightroom presets.

Inside Salvador Dalí’s eccentric Portlligat home

Nov 18, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Salvador Dalí’s eccentric Costa Brava home is the subject of ‘Casa Dalí’, a new book published by Apartamento with photography by Coco Capitán and testimonials by Spanish architect Òscar Tusquets, who worked with the artist on design pieces for BD Barcelona.