Ideally, I would like for my site to host old pictures of railroads, much like the fallen-flags website (although in a more convenient fashion).  While I admit that I am a bit saddened that I was not around to see some of the great railroad companies when they existed and capture their magic, I realized that I can take pictures of railroads today, and perhaps in 10 or so years, these pictures would be considered "old" and they would be on my website.  It's kind of a long-range goal, but a goal nonetheless.

Besides the scans of my old 35mm pictures, all the pictures taken by me on abandonedrails.com were taken with my Canon PowerShot A80.  It's a good camera, especially for an amatuer photographer like myself, and comes with just enough manual features to have some fun.

One thing the camera lacks is a strong zoom.  12x zoom is claimed by Canon, but only if you use the digital zoom. I'm more of a purist I guess, so I never use the digital zoom, thus relying on the optical zoom, whose limit is 3x. Sometimes, a railroad track is not close to public lands, and at those distances, a 3x zoom just doesn't cut it.

To remedy, I have purchased a "digital accessory" kit for my camera, which comes with a telephoto lens, a wide-angle lens, a couple of lens filters, a mini tripod (3" tall), a regular tripod, and a nice carrying case. I'm pretty excited about it and am looking forward to the UPS box arriving on my doorstep.  Hopefully with this kit, I can start taking better (and more) pictures to present on my website.