Picture & Video Taking

OK. By now I presume you've more-or-less gotten most of your ducks in a row. You've gotten registered on ebay and paypal, have a YouTube account, have a 7 or 8 mp digital camera, peeked around on ebay and gotten a little familiar with the site.

You may have even gotten in to your urban tank and hit the yard sales, thrift stores or raided your closets and/ or basement in search of tidbits to start selling on ebay.

You may also have given some thought to which format(s) you'd like to use to sell your items (auction, fixed-price, store inventory). You are not bound by one format only. You can choose to run one item as an auction, your next item as a fixed-price, and so on. You can do it any way you like.

I will expand a little here and tell how I go about getting my items ready to go.

Allow me to stop for a moment and try to discourage you from using your cell phone to take pictures of your items. Cell phones are, for the most part, inferior to standard full-function digital cameras. Sure, they're fine for taking pictures of the baby and sending to everyone. But, for items you'll be putting on ebay i the hopes of selling, you'll want pictures and videos that are extremely high-quality, and in that regard, cameras win hands down over cell phones.

I pretty much have one area of the home where I take a majority of my pictures and videos. I try to find the quietest, most-orderly spot in the house, which typically is my living room, although on occasion I'll use my kitchen. The kitchen counter is nice for small items: books, collectible coffee mugs, belt buckles, things of that sort. I like to have plenty of light when I take my pictures as well, so, frequently, I'll try to take pictures in the middle of the day to take advantage of the sunlight streaming in the windows. I keep a lamp nearby for auxillary lighting on overcast days, or evening-time picture-taking. I also keep some batteries handy for those items that I bought that take batteries, so I can make a video later, as well.

I gather all the things I plan on listing, and start taking pictures. Some people are content with taking just one picture of the item, and putting that  single picture up on ebay for all to see. But in most cases ebay will allow you to upload up to 12 per listing, at least, and even MORE for vehicles. So, why not take advantage of this, and take up to 12 pictures per item? You can take one primary picture, of course, then several others in close-up mode to capture more detail. Show off your items! If you can clean your items up a bit before taking pictures, even better. You can always upload MORE than 12 pictures per item, but, the first 12 are free, whereas each additional one costs 15 cents extra, I believe. I never pay for additional pictures, especially if I can simply throw a video in to the listing for FREE!

If your item is electronic in nature, open up the battery compartment and try to get a close-up of the sticker or area that shows the model number. You get the idea. You might as well take as many pictures as necessary to show off your item, right? Not only will buyers appreciate it, but it will likely eliminate the buyer who emails you three weeks later to ask if you can send a few more pictures and email them to him. Better to just to do it right the first time.

When taking your pictures, it should be obvious that you ONLY want sharp, in-focus pictures. Fuzzy or out-of-focus pictures are pretty much worthless. Fortunately, you'll be able to know immediately by looking at the camera display whether the picture you just took is decent or not. If it looks lousy, simply delete it on the spot and re-take it. You always want to avoid uploading bad, inferior, shaky, out-of-focus or over-exposed pictures to ebay. They will really make for a bad impression amongst your buyers. Also, try to eliminate as much as you can background clutter from your pictures. If the area you've selected for pictures has a coffee maker, dish detergent and pictures of grandma and granddad, use a sheet or a towel and simply cover them up for the 30 - 45 minutes while you'll be taking pictures.

OK. Now, while we've got the camera in our hands, and our item being photographed right in front of us, we might as well take another 30 - 60 seconds and make a video of it, too, right? Making videos for uploading to YouTube is strictly optional. You do NOT have to do this. But I can tell you it helps tremendously when selling items- particularly items that are powered. It's sort of like making your own TV commercial for the world to see.

Your camera will have the ability to easily switch between still pictures and video mode. I will generally take 8 - 12 pictures of an item, then a video, then move on to the next item. For me, this process, in this order, just goes so smoothly for me.

OK, I'll be assuming as I type this that you are making at least some videos for some of your items. I don't make videos for ALL my items- just the ones I think a video will help sell better or faster, or ones for which a video can more easily demonstrate the items' value or abilities.

Let's assume you bought five items at yard sales yesterday, and now you just took a total of 60 pictures and five videos. Next, I would carry those five things to my laptop, along with my camera, as well as a tape measure and a small scale. You are going to want to be able to tell people that this beautiful vase is 13" tall and weighs one and a half pounds. Remember, the object in your descriptions is to be as descriptive as possible.

The first thing you are going to want to do is to take the computer chip from your camera, insert in in to the slot on your laptop, find the folder with those images and videos, and then log on to YouTube with your account information. Those five videos that you took, you want to now upload those to YouTube first. This is because the uploading videos process ordinarily takes the longest. A 1-minute long video can take 4 - 5 minutes to upload, so those five videos can take upwards of half an hour. Once you get in to the hang of uploading videos, you'll get a feel for how long it will take. You will also want to label each video as well: "Mickey Mouse Watch";   "Donald Duck Toy". You don't need anything more elaborate right now as far as a video title.

Next, while those videos are uploading, you'll want to map out the 60-or-so images on a piece of paper. When I say "map out", here's what I mean. Your camera will assign each picture a different number. Let's say the first picture is file # 000001. It'll probably be a little more complex than that (probably more like SLR00001 or some similar type of identifier using a combination of letters and numbers), but we'll use # 000001 to simplify things. Let's say that the first picture, #000001 is of your Mickey Mouse watch. Proceed through your ebay pictures until you get to the LAST Mickey Mouse watch picture. It might be something like # 000014, assuming you deleted a few because they were out-of-focus or what have you.

So, on your piece of paper you would write something like #000001 - 000014, Mickey Mouse watch, or, for simplicity sake, #1 - 14, Mickey Mouse watch. If picture #15 begins your series of Donald Duck toy pictures, and ends with #25: #15 - 25, Donald Duck toy.

You get the idea. You want to know ahead of time which pictures go to which ebay item you plan to list. It will make finding and rounding them up quicker when it comes time to actually upload them to ebay.

OK, so you've made a list of all your pictures, and you've uploaded your YouTube videos. Keep your YouTube window open, and open up a new web browser window, and log in to ebay. Until you get them memorized, it may help to write all these log-in's down to make it easier so you don't forget them. Just make a list of your ebay, paypal and YouTube user IDs and passwords and keep them somewhere safe. You are going to need them pretty much every time you log in to these sites.

So now we've takes all our pictures and videos, uploaded our pictures, and are now sitting in front of our laptop ready to begin our first listing.

We are ready to proceed to the next post, entitled, simply, 'Listings'.