A Shot in the Dark

The other day, I wrote here about being caught in the middle of the big blackout at CES.  I mentioned that I had spent some of that morning with my Northwestern pal Wally Podrazik, who among other many things is the curator of the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.  But then we split off and went our merry ways.  It was about 15 minutes later than the blackout hit the entire convention center.

As I noted, it was nearly pitch dark for about 20 seconds...until a lot of the 75,000 or so people in the Central Hall took out their mobile phones and used the flashlight app.  Unfortunately, when I posted the photo I'd taken, I used the flash feature, so the photo I took looked much brighter than it was, and the picture was much blurrier than it was in reality, too...

I just got an email from Wally today with some photos attached.  As it turns out he took a bunch of shots -- some using the flash, like did, but happily some of his photos were without.  So, doing a much better job than I did, here's one of Wally's shots of what the Central Hall more accurately looked like.

Imagine a cavern-like structure, about the size of six-to-eight football fields, with perhaps 75,000 people there, utterly bewildered, not quite sure where the exits are, but grateful for the flashlight app.
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