The Cameras of the Astronauts
When
Where
Dr. Richard Nordin
Author of Hasselblad System Compendium
At the beginning of the American Space Program, there were no plans for Astronauts to participate in documenting their flights with photography. The initiative came from the astronauts themselves beginning with John Glenn and Walter Shirra in 1962. Subsequent photos by the astronauts have proven to be some of the most well known and significant photographs ever taken.
NASA initially had developed special photographic equipment for tasks like photographing the moons surface and time lapse photography for recording instrument readouts in the capsules sent into space. For the astronauts use, the cameras were largely modified professional, commercial cameras such as Hasselblad, Nikon, Leica, Linhof, Rollei, Robot, Kodak and Zeiss.
The production cameras from different manufacturers used in space over the first 30 years of the space program were modified and adapted in a number of ways to provide ease of use, reliability and high quality images. These technical modifications are interesting in themselves and like the development of other technologies in the space program, provided direction and inspiration for the development of camera technology in general. Examples, illustrations and background details of the cameras used in space - and some of the iconic images produced by these special cameras - are provided in this illustrated talk.
Richard (Rick) Nordin is a retired scientist. His academic training (a BSc, MSc and PhD) preceded a 45 year career in government and teaching at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada). He has a long time non-academic interest is in the history and technology of photography and published three books on Hasselblad cameras and has a particular interest in the cameras used in the US Space program.