02B5C: About Fire Trees and Magic

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 836

Over my years of walking around BGC, I've kind of fallen in love with fire/flame trees. They're literally all over the place, but particularly along main roads like 5th Avenue and they are absolutely gorgeous when they start to bloom. And I often end up stopping to take a few photos every time a particular fire tree catches my eye. Sometimes it's the super lush ones that are almost entirely orange. Other times it's just single pop of orange amid the green or (like in the photo above) bits of orange draped on rather bare branches.

And it's not like I create a proper photo album for these things in my virtual Google Photos library. A quick scan of the last month or so worth of photos and I've taken over a dozen fire tree photos. And some of them are the same tree but photographed on different days. And given more or less regular outdoor walks for exercise and I keep seeing these trees under different circumstances.

It's kind of amazing that we have the power to take photos this easily. Before you needed to think of bringing a dedicated camera to capture such moments. Go further back and you'd rarely waste actual film on random shots of trees that you walk past every time you run errands. It's just not done. And so we live in truly magical times where we carry devices in our pockets that allow you to take virtually unlimited photos of just about anything you want to document. And then most of us sync our devices to one cloud service or another and my random fire tree photos will now live forever in some Google server out there in the big unknown.

Technology is magic.

During the O Bar Pride event last Saturday, a friend asked me to send him a copy of a photo we had taken together. Now, everyone knows that data signal is crap once you're inside O Bar because there are just so many other devices crammed into a space that probably acts like a Faraday cage. And so it's not as simple to just send the photo via FB Messenger without stepping outside to get better signal. And I figured there must be an easy way to transfer it via Bluetooth or NFC or whatever. We both had Android devices and there are all these quick share options that I keep thumbing across in my phone menus, so one of those had to work right?

No. It wasn't that simple.

And so after a fair amount of fiddling with both our phones in a vain attempt to get one photo from my phone to his, I decided to give up, went to the bathroom, and THAT was enough for my phone to get back online and the photo got set.

Other times, technology can be shit, too.