Another photo from the Texas Hill Country shot yesterday morning. The wildflower bloom in Central Texas will peak within the next few days. That gives me a chance to shoot some conventional landscapes and panoramas next weekend. You have to get out early to beat all the mothers and children doing family pictures among the flowers. It makes me smile to see the doting parents saving memories and embarrassing moments to show their grown children in a few years.
There is no place on earth with more natural beauty than the Texas Hill Country on a Spring morning. In a good year you can drive for a hundred miles with the roadsides, fields and hillsides in continuous bloom. This is a good year.
I was new to photography when the Minolta 7i was released in 2002. I had started doing photography about a year earlier using an Olympus C2000z 2 megapixel camera. By the time the Minolta became available I was anxious to stretch my skills ‘to another level’. Funny, thinking that I spent nearly a thousand dollars on the 7i without having much of a clue as to how to make a decent photograph. It could be argued that I still am clueless about photography but we’ll have that discussion another day.
The Minolta turned out to be an excellent camera for me. It was slow with pretty bad auto focus and used a proprietary RGB color space. I loved it from the moment I held it on my hand. I even made a few decent pictures with it. It was obsolete even before it was released, being superseded by an improved model within a couple of months. Just a year or two later the entire company became obsolete and was acquired by Sony. Technology marches on and consumers must keep up.