Thematic Photographic 49: "Human" v.1.0

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"Waiting For The End"
Raleigh, NC - December 31, 1999 (Click to embiggen)

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This week Thematic Photographic focuses on "Human". Which is going to be tricky for me because I rarely take photographs of people and even more rarely publish them. Just too much of a liability most of the time. So the archives weren't much help for openers, but I did find this shot of the wait for the Apocalypse. It was New Year's Eve 1999 and the Y2K craze was about to reach its climax. By the time I took this shot it was probably already 1/1/2000 somewhere in the world, but the clock had not yet ticked over here on the East Coast. Seems like a lot of people were disappointed that there was no cataclysmic global system failure. But working in IT, I was definitely not one of them.

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Thematic Photographic 20: "Blur" v.1.0

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"First night R2K I"
Raleigh, NC - 12.31.1999 (Click to embiggen)

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"First night R2K II"
Raleigh, NC - 12.31.1999 (Click to embiggen)

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This week's Thematic Photographic prompt is "Blur". As photographers, we spend most of our energy trying to eliminate blur. Motion blur at least. The blur from a short depth of field is an often sought-after quality, but when something moves that we didn't expect the shot usually winds up shelved.

Which in most cases is all you can really do. But occasionally these accidents turn into some of the most intriguing photos we take. And on occasion, we'll even introduce motion blur on purpose.

The two shots below are examples of the former case. The serendipitous accident. If you've hung around this corner of the blogiverse for a while, you know my fascination with fireworks as a photographic subject. These two shots come from some of my earlier (though not earliest) experiments with this "very challenging" subject. The short version is I was still trying to figure out how to get a good fireworks shot and ... hadn't. So my shutter speed was far too slow to give me what I was after, but it did give me a couple of interesting shots.

These were taken at the "R2K" version of First Night Raleigh, on New Year's Eve 1999. My date and I were both in the IT field, and between us we had three beepers and two cell phones ready for the disaster that never came.

Come to think of it, even the memory of Y2K is pretty much a blur now.

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