Finding Sales on Canon and Nikon Gear Just Got Easier

Canon version, Nikon version

I find that you can get some great prices on used camera gear on Amazon, but it's usually a single item or two priced well-below the rest that's only briefly available, so I thought I'd do something about it. I spent the past three weeks working on my cloud-based, Amazon price-checking engine. It scours Amazon hourly, checking for changes in new, used, and refurbished inventory and prices.

There's no limit to what it can track, but because I had to start somewhere, I just stood up its first two manifestations - Twitter feeds for each Canon and Nikon camera gear.

The bot currently tracks over 1,500 products hourly for each their list, new, used, refurbished, and collectible prices and availability. Adding new products to the database is still a manual step, but only requires a single click per product with a custom GreaseMonkey script. As I find the time, product imports will also be automated, and even personalized.

The two Twitter feeds are at:
http://twitter.com/EFGlass_com
http://twitter.com/NKGlass_com

Please follow them on Twitter, and tweet any suggestions or other feedback to either of the feeds.

The companion lens-buying guide for Canon is online here, with a Nikon one in the works:
http://www.efglass.com/



Significant changes in price and inventory are sent through a list of notifiers - any one of those that decides to handle that update will queue up and send out its notifications. Currently, there are two sets of notifications - three (used, new, refurbished) for each Nikon and Canon, which are sent to their respective Twitter feeds with as much info as I can fit in to Twitter's 140 character limit, complete, of course, with a link to Amazon where you can grab that single used lens that's $50 cheaper than the rest.

Since this runs in the cloud, all processing is forked off into different tasks, and has a non-relational BigTable database, the only throttle I have to worry about is my contract with Amazon, which allows me to send out one batch of ten requests per second, or 36,000 products checked every hour. If Amazon wasn't throttling me, Google would allow me process those 36,000 in 3 minutes, and I'm confident the system could handle it.

Of course there are different strategies to handle many more products, but 36,000 should buy me a couple month's time to implement those work-arounds.

These Twitter feeds are only the beginning. I have a notebook full of ideas for directions to take this project. I've spent three weeks with my head in the cloud, and it's only getting more and more fun by the day.

More to come.

EFGlass.com - Know Canon Your Glass, See What It Can Do.

I could spend all weekend reading about camera equipment, but I always found most of the lens listing sites out there a little lacking in areas, so I spent the past three days putting together this initial version of EFGlass.com. It's not that complex right now, but believe me, I have plenty planned for future releases.

As it is, you can see Canon's full lens line-up with some basic information about each lens, a link back to its specifications page on Canon's website, a link to Amazon so you can check its current price, and one to a Flickr group pool, where you can see what people are using shooting with each it.

I'll post major site updates to this blog, and welcome any suggestions or comments - please email me, or call and leave me a voice message using the widget on the right side of this page.

Canon Picture Styles

Like it or not, this image effectively came straight out of my camera, using a custom picture style.

I shoot entirely in RAW mode, so I never bothered to look into these JPG presets. However, after seeing how far you could push these presets in-camera in this post at Canon 5D Tips, I thought I'd try messing with Canon's Picture Style Editor a bit to see what I could come up with.

The author of the 5D Tips blog post wasn't kidding - the software is very difficult to use. I have no idea what I did to achieve the above image, but it's cool enough that I'm going to keep tinkering to see what else I can come up with. Adobe Lightroom can't use these picture styles, so I had to export my JPG in Canon's DPP. And, since I'd rather swallow a handful of white-hot thumbtacks than use DPP, I think I'll just switch to RAW+JPG for the times when I'm tinkering with picture styles for crazy effects like the one above.

The Canon 40D and 5D Mark II only allow 3 custom picture styles, so I'm going to take only my favorite presets with me. I can always resort to DPP in post-processing, so it's not critical that I have my picture styles with me, but it'll be cool to see how well the effects work with the shots in-camera. Also, I'm no wizard with video processing, so it'll be a nice shortcut to apply these effects to video in-camera as well.

Overall, if you shoot RAW, nothing much is gained here but a little fun while shooting.