I’ve noticed recently that selling my lenses have been quite difficult. I keep getting young kids asking all sorts of questions that could be answered if they googled the model number. “Is it autofocus?” “Is this for full frame?” “Will this work on my camera?” “Is it good for real estate?”
It’s like a whole younger generation of photographers don’t know how to research things and get their information from youtube and tiktok where you can’t search model names or technical specs.
I sold a polaroid to a woman on Facebook. We meet up, chat about film. She’s like yah, yah, yah I have like 5 film cameras. I think wow that’s awesome to find another film friend. A couple nights later she messages me in a panic because she opened the back of her film SLR in light and wanted to know if the photos were ruined. Why don’t people research stuff before doing it? The reason she opened the back of the camera? The film sprockets tore and it got stuck mid rewind. Why did the sprockets tear? (after asking her questions I found out). She didn’t press the film release button at the bottom of the camera before rewinding and tore the film. So she just starts using this piece of equipment willy nilly not even knowing how to use it. When a simple search would have told her those two things. Then I felt like the bearer of bad news telling her the film is ruined.