Adding to the ever-expanding archive of downtown photographs. Having a better camera helps with the motivation.

Took a good 6 mile walk today gathering more reference photos. The season has hit for my job so finding time to work on the project gets interesting.

I recently acquired some historic photos for my 1926 project. Interestingly enough, I was able to acquire an aerial photograph of downtown from 1926.

Grabbed some more photos of the FEC Railway bridge yesterday with the DSLR. The resolution improvement over my old 5MP camera is pretty great.

Also with my 80-200mm lens, being able to zoom in and grab some detail over using digital zoom is a much needed improvement.

After beginning to model the bridge, I found areas that I did not have reference photos for so I did not know how to model those details, which I knew would happen. The entire process is progressively getting smoother as I go, partially due to the development of a production flow and to the additional tools.

I recently acquired a Pentax DSLR of Craig’s List and I’m quite impressed. It’s a K200D and is a serious upgrade from my old Nikon CoolPix 5400. Additionally, I have owned an old Pentax K1000 for the past 19 years that I have additional lenses for that fit on the K200D, with one caveat: If you have Pentax compatible lenses they will need a slight modification. Thanks to SelrahCharleS on dpreview.com for providing the walk through for this adjustment.

In addition to having twice the megapixels of my old camera, there aren’t enough nice words to be said about photographing in RAW format. The JPEG of the image in this post that was shot simultaneously with the RAW was much darker, has more shadows, and is considerably less saturated in color. All of which can be adjusted in Photoshop but not to the same degree as having the RAW file.

I currently have an archive of approximately 2,000 photos of downtown Jacksonville. Unfortunately 98% of that archive is not made up of RAW photos. I’m not interested in reacquiring my entire archive, but from here on out it will be another story.