Casa Montejo on the Plaza Mayor in Merida, Mexico, shot on a Nikon 990 in 2002.
Early Digital Work from the Yucatan Peninsula
One of the things I love about digital photography is that you can revisit old images and make them better as software improves — or even as your post-processing skills improve. The image above was taken in January of 2002 — with a Nikon 990 — in Merida, on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. I think it was the first international trip that I ever took without film. The 990 was a small, pocketable camera with a swivel body and a mere 3 megapixel sensor. It wouldn’t be my first choice today, but it was pretty impressive at the time.
I wasn’t on assignment and there no expectations placed on me for what images I would bring home. I was just shooting with the new found freedom of digital and I remember actually being a little giddy as I went through airport security when, for the first time ever, I just placed my entire camera bag on the x-ray conveyor and didn’t have to worry about requesting a hand-check for my film. A brave new world.
I recently ran across this old image file, and the others below, and decided to try running them through my current post-processing workflow in Adobe Lightroom Classic CC. Even though this photo was originally captured as a jpeg, the software was still able to pull a little more detail and toning out of it than in my last attempt, over 15 years ago. Raw files would show an even greater benefit from being reprocessed but I don’t think that was even an option on the 990. Maybe it was and I just wasn’t aware of that yet. Within a year I had my first DSLR — a Nikon D100 — and raw files became my format of choice.
Here are a couple of other shots from the same trip, along with a black & white version of the one at the top of this post:
