Things are going a bit slower at the moment, for a variety of reasons. I'm busier in term time with work and study commitments.
However there is also a change due to Archives New Zealand's change in their pricing. I have budgeted to spend not more than $50 per month on aerial photos. Previously this would get me 40 scans at 600 dpi but because of their price increases, they have now chopped this to 20 scans, and worse still, have chopped the resolution of those scans to 300 dpi. If the image is a very good quality then you can still see enough detail at that resolution to be useful. If it is less in quality then the 300 dpi scan is useless.
Because of that, what I get out of each batch will vary a great deal and sometimes it will be very little. The last batch had one hi-res scan of the 1980-1990 Clyde yard, which produced a useful outcome although incomplete. The 300 dpi scan from 1979 of the same general area was good enough to add some additional detail but not really much at all. The rest of the scans have been of little use, including the ones of Alexandra. They serve only to pinpoint areas I will have to pay more for later to get scanned at a higher resolution e.g. 1200 dpi. The photos of the Cromwell Gorge taken just before the dam filling started in 1992 were of little use.
Archives New Zealand have advised they can do high resolution scans on the basis that the first scan will cost $50 and each subsequent scan in the same batch will cost $10. So I will have to batch up a pile of images for hi res scan and get them all done in one go. For obvious reasons that will happen as soon as I have a big enough batch - say $200 worth. And that itself will have to wait until I have identified enough low-res areas of interest. So for now I will be heading down the line to find all the other stations and yards and sidings etc which are of interest and will just have to see what turns up in each batch, which may not always be a lot. In the meantime there is still a bit of tidying up of what I have already to do.
So while the maps may appear to go slowly, I expect that I will probably put in a big batch of hi res scans towards the end of this year and then be able to make best use of having the holidays available to push through a lot of progress all at once.
