Hasselblad Photography Manual for NASA Astronauts

[dave.gt]

My apologies for being absent lately. The good part about feeling quite ill is the quest for finding more interesting reading and yet more photographs to enjoy and study. The bad part is remaining productive because life demands it regardless.

However, my search has yielded a wealth of interesting things I did not know existed. And, with the angst I see among those who await their latest Hasselblad products, the following link may ease the pain, as it is a small example of the historical significance of Hasselblad. I find it much more interesting than sitting around this time of the winter season bemoaning the bad weather, the ugly landscape, environmental degradation, and the terror of urban sprawl. Professionally, I had my fill of all that after many decades.

When I find something beautiful, or very interesting, I just like to share it:


https://cdn.hasselblad.com/de1723ad...tronauts_photography_manual_by_hasselblad.pdf

 

[rdeloe]

Thanks for sharing Dave. I especially enjoyed the NASA engineer's (presumably) take on photographic composition:

https://i.ibb.co/wg1s6cY/Hasselblad-for-NASA-excerpt.jpg

Of course blue things have to be in the centre of the frame!

 

[Shashin]

A couple of things strike me. First, this was for the Space Shuttle program specifically. The first orbital flight with a shuttle was in 1981. This manual was published in 1984 and there had only been 3-4 flights up to that point. It would only be two years before the Challenger disaster. The Space Shuttle program ended in 2011.

The spot meter in the manual was made by Minolta (no billing in the manual). Incidentally, the first camera in space (John Glenn's Friendship 7 mission to orbit the Earth and the subject of the movie Hidden Figures) was a Minolta camera. Glenn had bought a couple of compact cameras from a local store and the Minolta Himatic seem to be the best fit. Photography was not actually a considered mission activity. John Glenn planted a palm tree in the courtyard of Minolta's Sakai plant after his mission--Google still shows the tree there.

 

[Godfrey]

All true. I believe it was Wally Schirra or Alan Shepard who later chose Hasselblad and convinced NASA management to adopt them as the standard camera for the Apollo program (it was early in the program, as Mercury was tailing down and becoming Gemini) as he thought himself a skilled photographer and wanted a better camera. That history is documented in another document that Dave posted a link a few months back.

But this is wonderful stuff. Thanks Dave! I sent the link to a couple of friends of mine and told them to read it and book their seat on SpaceX to go make some photographs...

G

"Good morning, campers!"​

 

[darr]

A couple of things strike me. First, this was for the Space Shuttle program specifically. The first orbital flight with a shuttle was in 1981. This manual was published in 1984 and there had only been 3-4 flights up to that point. It would only be two years before the Challenger disaster. The Space Shuttle program ended in 2011.

The spot meter in the manual was made by Minolta (no billing in the manual). Incidentally, the first camera in space (John Glenn's Friendship 7 mission to orbit the Earth and the subject of the movie Hidden Figures) was a Minolta camera. Glenn had bought a couple of compact cameras from a local store and the Minolta Himatic seem to be the best fit. Photography was not actually a considered mission activity. John Glenn planted a palm tree in the courtyard of Minolta's Sakai plant after his mission--Google still shows the tree there.

I noticed it was the Minolta Spotmeter M as well. I have the “F” version but only use it for averaging ambient light. That is what this meter is best for IMO and maybe why it was chosen. I imagine the extreme light differences during the mission(s) might have been best served with an easy to use averaging light meter. This meter is not the best for using the zone system and where IMO the popularity of the Pentax digital Spotmeter shines. But the ease of taking a highlight reading and pressing the “H” button, then take the shadow reading and press the “S” button and finally press the “A” button for the average is darn simple! This meter can do more, but for averaging light there is no other simpler meter I have found.

Thanks for the historical background info too!

Kind regards,
Darr

 

[gurtch]

Thanks for the link. In my early days I owned a Hasselblad 500C.
Dave in NJ

 

[Shashin]

I noticed it was the Minolta Spotmeter M as well. I have the “F” version but only use it for averaging ambient light. That is what this meter is best for IMO and maybe why it was chosen. I imagine the extreme light differences during the mission(s) might have been best served with an easy to use averaging light meter. This meter is not the best for using the zone system and where IMO the popularity of the Pentax digital Spotmeter shines. But the ease of taking a highlight reading and pressing the “H” button, then take the shadow reading and press the “S” button and finally press the “A” button for the average is darn simple! This meter can do more, but for averaging light there is no other simpler meter I have found.

Thanks for the historical background info too!

Kind regards,
Darr

Darr, I had the F version as well. And I agree, it was one of the nicest spot meters to use. I parted with it when I went digital.

 

[darr]

Pale Blue Dot

Yes, it's Valentine's Day, but to space nerds it's February 14, the day the famous "Pale Blue Dot" photo of Earth was taken by Voyager.

Voyager launched in 1977 and had traveled for 13 years when the photo was taken, at a distance of 3.7 billion miles from Earth.
I've attached a small copy of "Pale Blue Dot"; the Earth is the bright speck almost halfway up the diagonal line at the far right of the image.

It was only because of Carl Sagan that the photo happened at all; he thought it would be a neat idea for Voyager to "look back" at Earth as it was leaving the Solar System.
After seeing the resulting image, Mr Sagan, always ready with a bon mot, had this to say:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Thank you to photographers Ari and Peter De Smidt for sharing this here: https://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?156720-Pale-Blue-Dot

 

[Godfrey]

Thank you. Thank you, Carl Sagan, as well. Brought a tear to my eyes, again.

G
—
"We all get to be young and foolish in our lives.
If we survive that, we get to be old and foolish."