“To send a man to the moon, we had to invent a new language, spoken not by man, but by computers—at first very large, very expensive computers—but…we see the potential.”
I'm missing Spaceship Earth during the current refurbishment, so dug into my pictures from the attraction (I have SO many) for today’s shot. There’s a bit of a fan legend that this impossibly cool early computer operator was modeled after Dr. Valerie Thomas, the pioneering NASA scientist and inventor whose work in the late ’60s and ’70s paved the way for 3D imaging. Disney’s never confirmed that, and (for IP reasons alone), the figure was likely meant as a composite character representing the growing presence of women—and especially women of color—in STEM fields at the time. But regardless of the finer details, she embodies the type of pioneering work that Dr. Thomas and others like her were doing in that era. And she’s become an icon in her own right, to say the very, very least, on Spaceship Earth.
For my camera-curious, this was taken with my beloved 50mm to drink in all available light (this admittedly seems like a theme lately...), and shot at 1/100 second, f/1.2, and ISO 1600. That low f-stop refers to how wide the lens opens when the picture is taken. A low number like 1.2 means it opened up very wide to maximize the amount of light getting in. The "trade off" is that less depths of the scene are in focus...but that's often not a bad thing. Like here, where it makes our subject pop against a blurry background, placing the focus on her, with those lovely orbs of light (a/k/a bokeh) in the background.