lenbrazil
Saturn
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!
Posts: 1,045
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Post by lenbrazil on Aug 31, 2005 0:45:09 GMT -4
I'm a newbie so excuse me if this has been dealt with else where .
What is the rebuttal to his argument that the astronauts took too many photos in to short a period of time?
I believe the man to be truly full of of... I don't know if I can use such language in this forum But IF one were to accept his numbers it seems hard to explain.
Len
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Post by Count Zero on Aug 31, 2005 1:59:38 GMT -4
Welcome, len! I think that the time analysis was discussed prior to this forum's demise and resurrection a couple of months ago. However, many of this forum's participants also post at the Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board ( BABB, for short). Here is the BABB thread where many members, including some professional photographers, flush Jack's anal- ysis. Dang, don't you just hate when you run out of space at the end of a line?
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Post by PhantomWolf on Aug 31, 2005 2:59:44 GMT -4
Jack's entire study seems based about the idea that firstly that if you deduct a random amount of time for probably non-photo activitity, then have both Astronuats stop and stand still while one of them is taking photos and finally that they couldn't take more then about one a minute, there isn't enough time to take all the images. c.f. Jack's good friend Bart who claims that they didn't take -enough- photos.
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lenbrazil
Saturn
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!
Posts: 1,045
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Post by lenbrazil on Aug 31, 2005 8:54:14 GMT -4
I'm curious why didn't NASA commission cameras with automatic exposure, motor drives and viewfinders? It would have made photography much more efficient.
Sorry again if I'm asking a dumb newbie question.
Len
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 31, 2005 9:28:51 GMT -4
NASA's cameras did have motor drives. Jack White is simply wrong about that. The model they used was the EL/500D. The EL stands for "electric" indicating the drive. The "D" indicates the little crosshairs. They could take pictures as fast as they could push the button.
The standard Hasselblad viewfinder would have been useless, as it requires the photographer to look straight down into the top of the camera. This would have been difficult for the astronauts to do in their helmets. Further, the viewfinder is really not necessary if you're using a 60mm lens. That's a wide-angle lens. You just point the camera in the general direction of the subject. As a test, I used a Hasselblad MK70 (the successor to the lunar surface camera) with the viewfinder capped off with an aluminum plate. I had no trouble framing shots with it.
When the astronauts were given a 300mm lens later in the program, Hasselblad rigged up some sighting rings -- a sort of crude gunsight.
Mike Collins asked why automatic exposure hadn't been provided. He too thought the photography probably would have been easier. The answer is that even today automatic exposure doesn't give you good results. Automatic exposure existed in 1969, but Hasselblad didn't believe in it. It was quite crude. It was thought better -- and almost as easy -- to reduce the exposure situations to a small number of settings that the astronauts could master. The astronauts were trained to keep the shutter at 1/250 and adjust the f-stop among f/5.6, f/8, and f/11 as necessary. There was a sort of chart printed on top of the magazine listing the proper setting for each situation.
The possibility for automation was also probably eliminated in the general engineering spirit of KISS (keep it simple, stupid). Automatic exposure would just be another thing potentially to break.
Jack White is approaching the question of photography from a studio photographer's point of view, where a lot of attention is paid to "getting the shot right". A more accurate comparison would be photojournalism, where you either get the shot right in the moment it happens, or you miss it altogether. These exposure shortcuts, and other shortcuts like zone focusing, were part of the astronauts' training. The astronauts I've spoken too say they were not under pressure to get "perfect" shots, and in fact the opposite was the case: just get something approaching a good shot, and we'll fix it in the darkroom.
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Post by rocketdad on Aug 31, 2005 10:41:16 GMT -4
I worked for a company in college that provided "party pix" for fraternities and sororities. Terrible job, sometimes, but easy money for a few hours work on a weekend.
The job required a manual exposure/manual focus camera, and on training day we were handed a bottle of white-out to mark the 4' , 7' and 11' points on our focusing ring. We used a big handle-mounted flash and ONE exposure setting. We were payed by the pair of faces per frame, and we didn't have time to compose. We were docked for "bullseye" shots with lots of air above the people's heads.
One night I shot 9 rolls of film in 45 minutes. That includes rewinding by hand, and reloading standard 35mm roll film, in the special way we were taught that gets two more frames out of each roll by not fogging the leader. My cheap plastic winder died that night, but I got out of a really ugly toga party ultra-quick.
Amazing things can be done by people who are motivated and really know their gear.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 31, 2005 12:42:19 GMT -4
The Zeiss Biogon lens constructed for Apollo had detents built into the focus ring for the focus zones -- three zones plus infinity. There was a small paddle attached to the ring so that you just had to push it one direction or the other with a finger; you didn't have to grip the ring between two fingers. It takes all of ten minutes for that to be second nature.
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Post by rocketdad on Aug 31, 2005 13:11:45 GMT -4
I was a film student for a while in college, and I used a Russian 16mm movie camera called a Krasnogorsk. The guys at the school rental desk called it the "commie-cam" and generally disparaged it. Certainly not a Hassie. It was hard on the hands and pretty klunky.
Then I used it with gloves on. With a flap of masking tape on the mickey-mouse winder key (it folded down out of the way) I could operate the entire machine with thick mittens - zoom, focus, aperature, even the shutter speed knob. Go figure - Russia is cold!
Good equipment design is not hard -- but second guessing is apparenty easier.
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lenbrazil
Saturn
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!
Posts: 1,045
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Post by lenbrazil on Aug 31, 2005 14:20:20 GMT -4
I know of one other point where White was wrong unless the technology changed significantly by the mid 80's. After college I worked in a semi-pro photo lab and took color photography classes. He claims "The film (mainly Ektachrome color film) had a very narrow exposure range, which required PERFECT aperture and shutter settings", This would be true if NASA were to only use the transparencies as slides - which have very little range. While not as tolerant as negative film exposure errors could be some what corrected when making prints or dupes. I also remember Ektachrome being more tolerant that Kodachrome.
His quote seems to reveal a misunderstanding of photo exposures. Even if he were right about the exposure range they only would have to get perfect aperture OR shutter settings. Since shooting at 1/250 f/8 would produce the same exposure as 1/125 f/11.
Where they using ordinary Ektachrome or a special version? I have seen conflicting reports.
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
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Post by Bob B. on Aug 31, 2005 15:11:02 GMT -4
Where they using ordinary Ektachrome or a special version? I have seen conflicting reports. They used a standard Ektachrome emulsion on a special substrate material. This is probably why you've heard conflicting information; both answers can be correct depending on what you're referring to.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 31, 2005 18:06:42 GMT -4
Film is composed of two basic elements: the emulsion and the base. The base is the mechanical portion of the film. The emulsion is the photochemical coating. The emulsion used for the Apollo color photography is Ektachrome, the E-3 process. (If you buy Ektachrome today, it's the E-6 process.) The base was a polyster film called Estar. Kodak developed Estar for the Corona spy satellites, and at the time of Apollo it was still a secret. Today Estar-based films are widely available from Kodak. Polyster has excellent material properties across a wide range of temperatures.
So it's true to say it was special film. It's also true to say it was ordinary film. It depends on what properties of the film interest you.
I have had no problem exposing for reversal film. Much of my early photographic experience in my late teens and early 20s was with reversal film. No one told me that it was sensitive to exposure settings, so consequently I didn't think about it. I got all kinds of wonderful pictures using essentially cavalier settings.
Jack White is again thinking in studio photographer mode, where nuances of exposure make the difference between getting paid and not getting paid. Therefore studio photographers take greater care in metering and they bracket their shots. Exposure settings must be perfect only if you want the outcome to be perfect. But to argue that no good photos can be taken unless the exposure settings are perfect is hyperbole.
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Post by rocketdad on Aug 31, 2005 23:06:35 GMT -4
And besides, you can fix a lot of stuff in the development chemistry and in the printing if you know what you are doing. I have to assume NASA knows even more about darkroom "than they let on."
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lenbrazil
Saturn
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!
Posts: 1,045
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Post by lenbrazil on Sept 1, 2005 7:45:22 GMT -4
As has been pointed out before, contrary to Jack White's claims most of the shots were far from perfect. I always wonder with people like White, are they just willfully ignorant or do they knowingly lie either to sell books or to prop up "theories" they truly believe in? It hard to believe anyone could look at these images and say they are all perfectly composed. www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/catalog/70mm/Thanks to Craig Lamson who used to post here for the link
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Post by frenat on Sept 1, 2005 9:33:04 GMT -4
As has been pointed out before, contrary to Jack White's claims most of the shots were far from perfect. I always wonder with people like White, are they just willfully ignorant or do they knowingly lie either to sell books or to prop up "theories" they truly believe in? It hard to believe anyone could look at these images and say they are all perfectly composed. www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/catalog/70mm/Thanks to Craig Lamson who used to post here for the link Of they're perfectly composed! Didn't you know that most of the moon's landscape is naturally crooked, out of frame, and overexposed?
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Post by PhantomWolf on Sept 1, 2005 11:05:04 GMT -4
Jack White is either a liar and a fruad of Sibrel's calibre, or the biggest idiot on the planet. A number of the images he uses for her "studies" have plainly been cropped and resized so as to give his conclusions. If that isn't deliberate, then he truely is a moron.
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