Perhaps you’ve heard of concept “six degrees of separation”, which during the Internet era often is applied to social media connections. But its origin is much older. Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy proposed the idea in 1929 short story “Chains”—that no two people are separated by more than five intermediaries, which works out to six degrees of separation. Sometimes, online, the connections surprise for being so seemingly far removed, yet close. That’s how I see today’s photo selection.
Searching Flickr for “Groundhog Day”—and it’s today—summoned everything but the oversized rodent. Self-titled “A Fast Car” caught my attention for perspective and panning. In scanning the Flickr profile for the photographer, Takashi Hososhima, a familiar picture greeted me. Turns out Takashi and I are previously acquainted. I must apologize for forgetting. My return to him and his photostream is roundabout.
“I purchased dSLR to take pictures of cat Miyako”, Takashi explains. The photo of her in his profile is one of two dozen I used in my short ebook My Cat Wants to Know. Imagine my surprise. “As I take photos of her, I realized I love taking photos—and I started to take many kinds of pictures, from bugs to animals”.
Takashi, who joined Flickr in January 2010, shoots several different cameras, including the Nikon D5200 (used with Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 lens for today’s selection) and Canon EOS 7D (for the Miyako profiler). He is a software developer living in Tokyo, Japan.
“The crosswalk made the car look 50 percent faster than it actually running”, he says of the Flickr-a-Day-33 pic. Takashi used a technique known as photographic panning, where a longer exposure creates motion of the background and other objects as the camera follows a moving object that appears still.
So-o-o-o, why did Flickr search for “Groundhog Day” pull up this photo? Takashi shot it on Feb. 2, 2014.
Photo Credit: Takashi Hososhima