Photo Friday - PhotoTrice

Spring – 2017

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.

Ancient History

Flower close-up - Minolta 7i — Flower close-up – Minolta 7i

It is interesting the way time is measured by modern technology. The cycles are so short that a new product may be almost obsolete on the day it is released for sale. We have become used to a constant flow of goods, sometimes in categories that didn’t even exist in the ancient past of two years ago. So it is with some amusement that I publish this post featuring an image shot with a digital camera fourteen years ago.

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 It was obsolete even before it was released, being superseded by an improved model within a couple of months.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.

Reflection

San Antonio is a city that dates back to Spanish Colonial times. It has gone from a presidio and village on the banks of the San Antonio river known as San Antonio de Bexar to a modern metropolis. In 1731 fifteen families of Canary Islanders invited by the king of Spain, arrived to begin new lives “about a musket shot from the presidio”. My wife proudly traces her ancestry to those families. They are deep roots in the Americas that few non-native people can match.

San Antonio has always been a crossroads of culture and commerce. Texicans, Texians and finally Texans as they came to be called built lives here. Texans were and are as tough a bunch of individualists as can be found anywhere. Revolutions and Indian wars and civil conflicts swept the land over the years but they held fast. When the Texas revolution came they stayed and died but didn’t yield. When Teddy Roosevelt wanted Rough Riders, he rode his horse into a bar next to the Alamo waving his hat asking for volunteers. He got them. That is how legends are born.