The first space photographers (BBC)
By Stephen Dowling
Anyone who learned to take photographs back in the days of film will remember how frustrating it could be. Quite apart from the trickiness of loading the film, budding photographers couldn’t be sure whether they had a potential cover of National Geographic or a pile of prints fit for the litter bin until the negatives came back from the lab.
Now imagine you had to deal with these difficulties hundreds of miles above a glittering blue Earth, tethered to the space capsule that is your only link between home and the endless gulf of space. Your movements are constricted by the clumsy spacesuit that allows you to survive out here. And you can’t even hold the camera up to your face to compose your pictures properly, thanks to your ungainly helmet. Finding out whether you’ve shot a masterpiece or a mistake has to wait until you’re safely back on Earth – where you might discover that all that cosmic radiation has fogged your film completely.
It’s a wonder Nasa’s astronauts managed to capture anything at all, let alone the astonishing images they did. A new exhibition, containing some of the most striking, opened last week in London at the Breese Little gallery. ‘Encountering the Astronomical Sublime: Vintage Nasa Photographs 1961 – 1980’ includes many images snapped by astronauts, back in those pioneering days of space exploration.
Radioactive risk
“Space missions in the 60s and 70s were definitely pushing at the limits of camera technology – and indeed the limits of every other type of technology. In many cases they didn't know how successful things would be until they actually tried it,” says Marek Kukula, the public astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
“It's interesting to note that when Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in 1961 there were no cameras onboard his Vostok capsule. Just eight years later the first landing on the Moon was broadcast live on TV.”
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more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140925-the-first-space-photographers
Interesting article -- worth reading through to the end.