Goodwill Hunting

At the risk of creating competition for myself in the future I feel compelled to tell you about my latest successful treasure hunt.

I have been following a blog I ran across called “52 Cameras in 52 Weeks” by “Pho-Tony” (Flickr handle) for a few months. Pho-Tony takes a different camera every week, reviews it, takes a few photos with it (including a self portrait with a funny hat taken with the camera) and publishes everything on his blog. Of course Pho-Tony apparently got carried away a bit since he left week 52 behind a couple years ago and is now on week 166!

One of the interesting things about Pho-Tony is that he gets many of his cameras from “charity shops” so it started me thinking – maybe I should look into places like the local Goodwill and Salvation Army stores for camera deals. Not that I really need any more cameras of course, but it seemed like an interesting photo related past time.

Anyway, all the local shops I checked into had little to offer but I discovered that Goodwill has an ongoing online auction that rocks! There are hundreds of cameras and lenses available from Goodwill stores all over the country through the web site “shopgoodwill.com”. Of course some risk is involved since few of them have been “checked out” and are therefore sold “as is” but there is some effort made to ascertain if the shutter clicks and the film advance advances, and those that clearly do not work are identified as such.

I was able to snag a very nice Olympus XA2 for only $14 plus shipping and saw another one go for about $20. In the few weeks I have been monitoring activity on the site I have seen several really nice SLR’s, some with extra lenses and other accessories, go for from $10 to $50. There is even a section for “vintage” cameras with some really cool stuff. I highly recommend that you check it out if you’re in the market for used cameras or equipment. You can help yourself and a worthy cause at the same time, just don’t bid on anything I am bidding on!

Oh, and I should have the first roll of film back from the XA2 soon and will let you know how it turns out. So far everything seems to work fine but the proof is in the pictures so I’ll withhold commentary until then.