Monday in the Rosebud café. Victoria Public Information Officer O. C. Garza--who also is a Leica fan--and I are having lunch. Typically, we both brought our cameras.

   O. C. had his Epson R-D1, a digital rangefinder. An excellent review available at:

   http://www.luminous-landsca...

    On the table next to the Epson was my Leica M6. See:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wik....

   A youngster who works at the café came up to the table and looked at both cameras.

   “Oh,” he said, pointing at O.C.’s Bessa, “That’s a digital camera. But this,” he said, touching the M6, “this is a REAL camera.”

   Now that’s a topic of a conversation!

   The whole digital revolution prompted me to remember a winter day in 1965 at the Globe News Publishing Company in my hometown, Amarillo.

   The eyes of everyone in the photography department were glued to the Associated Press wirephoto machine as the paper slowly, painfully, inched forward line by line to reveal another moonscape taken by Ranger VIII as it crashed on the moon.

   February 20.

   The next day, sitting in the same room, I remember predicting that we would live to see the day when a photographer shot a picture for the paper with a TV camera, transmitted the picture back to the company by radio where it would be captured at a TV screen. The picture editor would "process" the image with knobs to adjust brightness and contrast and then send it directly to engraving.

   “The day that happens,” said another photographer named Lonnie, “I will quit photography."

   Actually, he quit the next summer to sell, I seem to remember, refrigerators.

   I can only guess what he must think about today’s photographic world. I may still shoot film but, once it is processed, everything is digital. I scan the negative, correct the photo with Adobe Photoshop and then post the images to the internet.

   The first time my wife Reba showed me Photoshop, I realized that never again would I have to galvanize my lungs with acidic acid stop bath and fixer.

   There are some who still know the thrill of alchemy, watching a print develop in a tray.

   But it can’t hold a candle to the ability to turn to a computer and see a sunset on another world:

   http://photojournal.jpl.nas...

   Now, THAT’S magic!