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Expedition
7
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Taking
Pictures
To document
what we do onboard, as well as to take photos of the Earth,
we have some very nice camera equipment here. As the weeks
go by I'm finding that I am managing to take better and better
photos and video - so there is something after all to this
whole concept of practice. Before flight, our instructors,
Mark, Steve and Olga, taught us not only how to use the photo
and video equipment itself, but also how to frame and shoot
nice photos. It was great fun learning all of this, and even
more fun getting to put it to good use.
Since
there is only limited room in the Soyuz capsule to bring things
up here and back home (besides us), we are not using regular
film for our photos. Instead all of our still photographs
are now digital. Our digital cameras are 35mm and have a 2000
by 3000 CCD matrix, so they take pictures almost as good as
you can get on regular film. We downlink our photos each day
to the ground, where there is a group of people who process
them. We get occasional e-mails from Mark and Steve pointing
out mistakes we've made and things we can do better - and
by the way our photos have improved, I hope they see they
are making a difference!
We have
quite a few lenses we can attach to the 35mm digital cameras
- ranging from a 16mm fisheye, wide-angle lens and all the
way up to a 400 mm monster telephoto. We also have a doubler
so we can turn our 400 mm lens into an 800 mm lens. For interior
shots, we mostly use a 24 mm to 85 mm zoom lens with a flash.
We've also taken some interior photos without a flash that
came out pretty well. Since there are only two of us, if we
are both working on something and we'd like some photos of
the operation, we set our camera up on a bracket, and program
it to take a series of photos automatically every few minutes.
Every once in a while we get a good one this way.
When
shooting out the window, the most common lenses we use are
the 50 mm for wide shots, the 180 mm for taking pictures of
regional areas (like a city and surrounding regions), 400
mm for close-up city shots or places of geographical interest
(like volcanoes), and the 800 mm lens for close-up shots where
you can see details like individual trees and small buildings.
I usually set the exposure time to around 1/500th of a second,
and let the camera automatically set the aperture, or F-stop.
It has taken a lot of practice to get better at taking these
shots.
The first
part about shooting pictures of, say a city or some geographic
feature, is of course spotting it on the ground. Sometimes
that isn't easy because all the nice reference lines that
you see on a map aren't actually drawn on the ground. Lakes
and shorelines are the best landmarks to find a small target
since they are very easy to spot. Although sometimes lakes
do not look like they are drawn on the map since many of them
change shape as water levels rise and fall. Rivers are good
landmarks if they go through a dry area - then the river and
the surrounding green vegetation will stand out very well
against the brown background. Rivers in heavily forested areas
do not stand out and are easily mistaken for one another if
there are many rivers in the same area. For instance, since
the beginning of the mission I have been trying to shoot a
photo of Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca city built on a mountaintop
in Peru. It is located in a heavily forested mountainous area
along the Urubamba River north of the city of Cuzco. The problem
is that there are several rivers in that area, none of which
are easy to spot, and they all look the same from 300 miles
away. I have taken maybe a hundred photos of the area, but
have yet to capture it in a picture!
Once
you have spotted what you want to take a photo of, the next
problem is holding the camera steady enough to take a nice
photo. When using the 50 mm or 180 mm lens, this is pretty
easy. But when using the 400 mm or 800 mm lens it takes some
practice. That's because the field of view of these lenses
is so small that the motion of the Space Station in orbit
is enough to blur the photos. When shooting with the big 800
mm lens, the field of view covers only maybe 10 miles on the
ground. That means we can in principle see objects as small
as a car. The problem is that we are moving about 5 miles
per second, so if we use a shutter speed of say 1/500th of
a second, we will move about 50 feet in just the time the
shutter is open. This means that if we hold the camera perfectly
still, it will smear out the images by 50 feet. If the shutter
speed is set to 1/1000th of a second, there typically isn't
enough light in the image and it comes out too dark. So I
usually use about 1/800th of a second. To get better resolution,
you have to track the camera to follow your target. Things
move quickly in the viewfinder so you have to pretty rapidly
find what you are looking for, start swiveling the camera
to keep the scene stationary in the viewfinder, and snap the
picture. If you do it right, you can spot houses, trees, and
sometimes even cars on the road. A few weeks ago I wrote about
trying to snap a photo of the Experimental Aircraft Association
fly-in at Oshkosh. I did manage to get a nice photo of the
airfield where you can make out the thousands of individual
airplanes parked on the field. You can even see the smoke
trail of a small airplane performing an airshow at the time.
As for
the video equipment, we have both small hand-held digital
camcorders and a full professional video/audio recording setup
in the Service Module. The camcorders are nice because they
are small and easy to set up, and because editing is really
easy since they have a digital high-speed connection. One
of the things I've been using the camcorders for is to record
images of lightning storms from space. While your eyes are
much more sensitive than the cameras, the camcorders do a
surprisingly good job with nighttime shots. We also use these
camcorders to downlink live video to the ground (they connect
to any of several data transfer ports we have onboard).
As a
friend said to me, if nothing else at the end of this mission
I'll have the best photo album around!
This is
me holding the digital camera with the 800 mm lens attached.
The portholes in the floor are where we take most of our pictures
of the Earth. On the wall you can see some of our other photo/video
equipment.
An example
of the kind of detail visible with the 800mm lens - this is
the city of Rome. Get yourself a map of Rome (on the internet
of course), then zoom in on the photo. Use the river snaking
through the city to get your bearings. You can see the dome
of St. Peter's Cathedral in the Vatican, the Roman Coliseum,
the old Roman Senate, as well as more modern features like
the train station and the soccer stadium.
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