A Moment in Time

Pretty cool:

Where will you be on May 2, 2010 at 11:00 AM EST?

Wherever you are, the New York Times hopes you’ll have a camera — or a camera phone — in hand. And they hope you’ll be taking a picture to send to Lens (the photography blog) that will capture this singular instant in whatever way you think would add to a marvelous global mosaic; a Web-built image of one moment in time across the world.

The NYT extends the invitation to everyone, everywhere. Amateurs. Students. Pros. People who’ve been photographing for a lifetime or who just started yesterday.

What matters more than technique is the thought behind the picture, because you’ll only be sending one. So please do think beforehand about where you will want to be and what you will want to focus on. Here are the general topics:

Religion
Play
Nature and the Environment
Family
Work
Arts and Entertainment
Money and the Economy
Community
Social Issues

In New York, it will be 11 o’clock on Sunday morning when the clock for Coordinated Universal Time — which carries the neither-English-nor-French abbreviation U.T.C. (it’s formerly Greenwich Mean Time) — reaches 15:00 hours. So some people will be settled into church pews while others prepare to head out to the park, if not the beach. Los Angeles and San Francisco will be a good deal quieter at such an early hour, except for some hard-partying types unwilling to concede that it’s no longer Saturday night. Lunch time will be at hand in Rio de Janeiro, dinner time in Cape Town. Dusk will be bringing an end to another tough day in Afghanistan, while midnight will be an hour away in Beijing. For Australians, it will already be first thing Monday morning.

After you take your photo, please send it as soon as possible to submit.nytimes.com/moment (the link should be active at 15:00 U.T.C.). On the Web form, you’ll be asked to categorize your photo by location and subject (the topic list shown above) and to include caption information. We don’t expect everyone to hit 15:00 exactly, but we do ask that you try to stay within a few minutes of that targeted time.

The photos will appear quickly on the Lens blog and on NYTimes.com, and — if you’d like — you’ll be able to arrange them by country, by topic or by how they were ranked by other readers. Or you can just view them randomly. Some will almost certainly be spotlighted on the Lens blog.