Making Love In The Afternoon

With Cecilia, up in my bedroom.

Okay.

Having been to work, I now have the extra shots of my new Yashica MAT 124G.

I am still geeking out a bit, even several days after getting this camera. This is, without a doubt, the nicest film camera that I have ever owned. I might add, “Yet”, to that statement, because I just won another cool medium-format camera, today at auction, and I am hoping to have it by the weekend!!

Even with both cameras, can still say, with confidence, that this is a very fine machine.

Now, I would like to show you a screen-shot of the “description” (if you could call it that) of this camera, and the description that I wrote about a camera that I won through my own auction, a few months ago.

First, the description for the Yashica.

That’s it.

The “Lead” is what you see as you scroll through the auction, there will be a picture of the lot next to the lead. Once you click through, the “description” is what the auction house tells you about the lot. If there are limits to the number of characters allowed in a description, I haven’t found one. My auction uses the same platform, so this is an apples to apples comparison.

Here is the description that I wrote for a camera that I ended up getting for myself. I usually write the descriptions for all of the interesting cameras that come into the shop.

If you are interested in seeing what this camera looks like, I wrote about it in a previous post:

You can see that a good bit of extra effort was put into the description that I wrote for the Miniature Graflex, as opposed to the description that was written for the Yashica. I can (sort of) understand the desire to not spend time doing research and then writing descriptions for many, if not hundreds of different auction lots, especially if you are the only person doing the work, as I suspect the case for the person running this auction, but then you need to have a better handle on taking pictures of your objects.

Some auction houses go so far as to claim the the pictures are “part of the description”, but then fail to include vital information about the object in their pictures. For instance, there is a serial number on the back of this camera, just under the lid for the focusing hood, that would provide some usable information for a potential buyer. As you might suspect, the pictures that accompanied this cameras “description” did not really show those numbers well, which is to say, clearly. Here is a shot of the back of this camera, and I was not trying to show the serial number. See if you can find it.

The pictures that did accompany the description did show all sides of the camera, so that was nice. Additionally, there were many other cameras at auction that were in excellent condition, for their age; that’s a good sign. What that tells me is, all of the cameras came from the same consignor, a consignor who was careful with their cameras. I bid with confidence that this specific Yashica was in good condition, and I was correct. I got the camera for a very fair price (which is to say, well below retail), and I am looking forward to shooting it.

I am still going to take it in and have it looked over, before I shoot with it. In the past, I would have already had several rolls through it by now, but I have found myself growing less impulsive and more contemplative as I have grown older.

Why are you laughing?