Christmas and New Year have passed, we’ve made New Year’s Resolutions to make more of an effort with our photography so what better time of year to treat ourselves to new equipment to pack into our camera bags. The aftermath of Christmas normally means that money’s a little bit tight, but if you have a little something saved away, there’s so much is available for us to buy at a fraction of it’s original retail cost. It’s brilliant and you’d be daft to miss out. I’m already on the hunt, but I’ll let you into my little secret.
You mean the January Sales?
By all means, you can buy new equipment, from your local camera store or giant online retailers the the January sales, or you might even have picked up a bargain from an impressive Black Friday deal that you didn’t need to get into a riot for. Fellow photographers are humble souls.
But no, the January sale, that normally starts on Boxing Day, isn’t what I’m thinking of here.
This is a time of year that we should be grateful. Grateful for people spoiling themselves, their partners or their spoilt brats with upgrades to their photographic equipment over the festive season, sometimes even when it’s unnecessary, because they have perfectly good, functional cameras, lenses and other equipment that are going to get left behind.
Almost everyone I know has to pinch a penny, even a little bit, at this time of year. It’s about this time when they realise that they’ve got something of value that’s been replaced by a newer model by Santa and often take to the online garage sale with plans of making it to the end of January without having to resort to serving that lonely can of Spam for breakfast, dinner and tea.
eBay is a gold mine. If you can get over the snobbery of only using brand new equipment and venture into the second hand market, then the world is your oyster. Only one of my 3 lenses is brand new and it hardly gets as much use as the other two, and they’re great. I might actually list that lens this afternoon!
I’ve done some snooping and found some great deals.
If you’re not really sure what you want and fancy a look around here’s a few helpful links:
Canon Equipment for Sale
Nikon Equipment for Sale
But if you have a bit more of an idea of what you specifically want, you can filter out certain models or equipment.
Canon 7D for sale at less than half price on eBay
The Canon 7D was released in 2009 at around £1700. It’s a perfectly capable, advanced, digital SLR camera and has been popular amongst the ranks of professionals. Since then, the 7D Mk2 has been released. People have upgraded and the Original 7D is now less than half the price and there’s a few available!
Canon 50mm f1.4 for sale on eBay
Almost everyone I know has the “Nifty Fifty” f1.8 lens. and it’s a brilliant little lens for the money. I upgraded recently from that to the f1.4 version that Canon offers and I wouldn’t look back. And I upgraded to a second hand model and it still exceeds all of my expectations.
Ok, I may be a little biased towards Canon, but the results are there for Nikon too if you just scratch the surface of eBay.
Have you ever bought second hand? What were your experiences?
Posted by dwoosnam 
Dan Woosnam 