Photo Friday - PhotoTrice

Water

The Texas Hill Country is filled with springs that feed small creeks. They mirror the levels of the underground aquifers that are the source of water in Central Texas. When the rains come, water percolates down into the limestone and eventually overflows onto the land as springs. Each spring has a unique habitat it supports.

We live in a world where the environmental balance is rapidly shifting. Conditions are not as predictable as they once were. There are now great concerns about the future viability of the precious aquifers we depend upon. For now the waters are flowing. The habitats they support are still intact.

In my lifetime I have witnessed devastation of much of our natural world. I will not pay the price for the squandering of our world but someone will. We are beings evolved to live within the natural environment of our planet. Our truly wonderful technologies cannot provide a substitute for our home on Earth.

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.