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.

Finally got my license of LWCAD and it’s definitely going to increase my modeling speed. I just have to spend a bit of time learning its tools and then it’s party on. Additionally, the G5 should allow me to do a good portion of initial planning and modeling on the same computer now, whereas before I would set up my plans in Illustrator on the Mac, then port over to the PC.

New renders soon to come!

The old G4 is officially out the door and replaced with a new (to me) G5. Mass quantities of improvement.

As it turns out my old hard drive isn’t dead, it’s mostly dead. Fortunately I’ve been able to recover all my Jacksonville 3D related files. The old drive will function for a while, allowing me to copy files from it, then it stops copying. Unplugging it for a time, then plugging it back in allows this temporary functionality.

I’ve been itching to get back into the swing of things with some much needed updates. Looking at getting LWCAD from Wtools3D.com to increase production as well.