I was 8 and also glued to the TV screen. My Corvair was shiny and 2 years new, in the hands of another lover!
I was 13 and almost had "stealled" the family car (Fleetmaster 1948, Chevrolet) to went to my uncle's home, in order to record the moon landing on tape.
Our home tv set had a soundless wake up, just at that morning!
No spare tubes at home (I was limited to open the back cover and replace a flawed tube, if I could find the culprit, but was not allowed to touch the family sacred tv set with any other tools.
My soldering iron, the pliers and wire cutter were formally forbiden inside it! (I have a long and persistent family record of dismantled tube radios and the like, since I was three. Both in number of units and extent of damage). The family aprooved japanese technician was not reacheable by phone.
No way, I'd said to myself. And I found a NOT-ALLOWED way to overcome the situation...
A thirty days fine for a licenseeless driving (6 km forth and back to my uncle's home): I was limited to a straight walk from home to school (two blocks away), then to our family hardware store (lunch upstairs, at my grandmother's home) (twelve blocks away), and back home (another ten blocks).
Fully supervised by my mother's chronometer control and a no excuses phone call for each leg of the trip!
I was there. Well, in a huddle in our neighbors house watching the action on their ancient TV. We had just arrived back in Blighty after a year in Australia. Hadn't had time to get a TV of our own yet.
By bedroom walls were plastered with Apollo posters and mission plans etc.
Saved all the newspaper cuttings, but I tossed them about 10 years ago in a move. I still have some Apollo 11 cloth patches and some special minted commemorative like coins.
In Oz, it was only in B&W
Amazed the restored video had not set off the "NASA sound stagers". Noise reduction and other image enhancements have been just normal technologies for decades now. Just the how and how much has improved over the years. But the restoration looks pretty good. Given what they got, that is the amazing thing. That anything was captured at all. Old pickup tube technology was pretty touchy. So, when are we going back? Time to end the vacation.
Nothing can compare to a color image of the event.
I had a Petri FT SLR 35mm back in the early 70s, and developed film, and appreciate good photography. So glad we didn't have to depend on just video for our perspective, could lend itself to fakery.
But that color image from such a different and distant place was something that really captured me.
Apollo 11 had three Hasselblad 500s. These are large format cameras that provide an impressive resolution, far better than what most people have seen. Even NASA's Web site doesn't contain many of the the full resolution scans from these cameras, but it's a start:
By today's standards, these are fairly low resolution for such large format images. And as JPEGs, they contain compression artifacts. Somewhere NASA has higher-res scans in camera raw format. Those would be magnificent to look at.
@Gordon, Do you happen to know what size film a Hassleblad 500 takes?
Hasselblad cameras are 'medium format' cameras and use so-called "120" film (not talking about the newer digital models here), which are approximately 6cm wide. The Hasselblad medium format is square, so that would give you 6x6 cm pictures.
The Blads used for Apollo used 70mm sprocketed film, like Cinerama. This avoided a number of issues, including keeping the thin film flat across the aperture, and letting them remove the wasteful opaque paper backing typical of 120 film. The image area for 70mm is a bit more than 120 film (about 65mm versus ~57mm, when you take into account aperture borders).
Modern *consumer* negative/slide scanners produce >3200 dpi, uninterpolated. That's a lot of pixels for a 65mm image. Pro scanners are even higher, especially with software interpolation.
Elsewhere on NASA's expansive site are much, MUCH higher resolution images of things. Their space colonies set, for example, is available for download at much higher resolutions than their public images of the Apollo missions, one of the most important scientific events in human history. I'm not exactly sure why this is. OTOH, I understand if you're doing research you can go into NASA and request these images at much higher resolutions.
I know I was never master at it, and going digital didn't help my ability to get a good exposure. But I was able to get some pretty unique shots with it during the time I did have it. Some of the aircraft at Frankfurt and Main airport during the seventies, planes in and out.
Europe in different sections, trouble was we decided to have it printed on the grainy paper back then. I'm pretty sure I have my negatives but not 100 percent.
My first camera was some old folding bellows model (probably an Ensign or something cheap) from the 30s that my dad gave me. Used an oddball roll film I can't remember (but was large enough that the prints were contact, and not through an enlarger). The bellows had a pinhole in it, so all my shots were lightstruck. Gave them a ghostly look!
He then gave me his old Contax 35mm reflex. It was completely manual. You even had to stop it down manually. What it did was teach me to memorize light and settings. After a while I got pretty good at it. I never used a light meter - didn't have one. As a result, even when I had a metered camera (mid 70s) I hardly paid any attention to the needle.
I took mostly pictures of my dog, some landscapes, and my favorite: long exposures during night time. I had my own enlarger by then, so I was developing the film and making prints. My first jobs as an adult were in camera stores (where we sold Petrie's, among others) and commercial darkrooms. I actually don't miss chemical photography. We have it much better these days.
erco
Posts: 20,256
Comments
Hi erco
I was totally frozen, standing still in front of one of these 21" (lower left corner image)
magazine-advertisements.com/uploads/2/1/8/4/21844100/general-electric-25-1.jpg
, watching, hearing, and registering every sound with one of those.
s.sbito.it/images/29/29632537618264.jpg
Henrique
P.S. Both long gone! Sniff!
I was 13 and almost had "stealled" the family car (Fleetmaster 1948, Chevrolet) to went to my uncle's home, in order to record the moon landing on tape.
Our home tv set had a soundless wake up, just at that morning!
No spare tubes at home (I was limited to open the back cover and replace a flawed tube, if I could find the culprit, but was not allowed to touch the family sacred tv set with any other tools.
My soldering iron, the pliers and wire cutter were formally forbiden inside it! (I have a long and persistent family record of dismantled tube radios and the like, since I was three. Both in number of units and extent of damage). The family aprooved japanese technician was not reacheable by phone.
No way, I'd said to myself. And I found a NOT-ALLOWED way to overcome the situation...
A thirty days fine for a licenseeless driving (6 km forth and back to my uncle's home): I was limited to a straight walk from home to school (two blocks away), then to our family hardware store (lunch upstairs, at my grandmother's home) (twelve blocks away), and back home (another ten blocks).
Fully supervised by my mother's chronometer control and a no excuses phone call for each leg of the trip!
Hard times, sure they were!
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/os6Z9wa_cb4/maxresdefault.jpg
I was 17 and on study vacation for our Trial Higher School Certificate (final year in high school in Australia before Uni).
I was there. Well, in a huddle in our neighbors house watching the action on their ancient TV. We had just arrived back in Blighty after a year in Australia. Hadn't had time to get a TV of our own yet.
By bedroom walls were plastered with Apollo posters and mission plans etc.
In Oz, it was only in B&W
Jim
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/
Behind the scenes of how the Aussies set up a satellite dish in Parks, Australia to receive the signals from the moon at the correct time.
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-neil-armstrong-moon-bag-18mn.html
Too bad Eagle 3D hasn't been updated past Win7 32 bit:
http://en.freedownloadmanager.org/Windows-PC/Eagle-Lander-3D.html
http://roboticsunderthestole.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-first-robotic-rover.html
http://roboticsunderthestole.blogspot.com/2015/08/infographic-on-distances-driven-on.html
http://roboticsunderthestole.blogspot.com/2015/08/video-of-lunokhod-1-i.html
I had a Petri FT SLR 35mm back in the early 70s, and developed film, and appreciate good photography. So glad we didn't have to depend on just video for our perspective, could lend itself to fakery.
But that color image from such a different and distant place was something that really captured me.
EDIT: Is Neil hanging laundry?
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap170722.html
My condolences!
Apollo 11 had three Hasselblad 500s. These are large format cameras that provide an impressive resolution, far better than what most people have seen. Even NASA's Web site doesn't contain many of the the full resolution scans from these cameras, but it's a start:
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/images11.html
There are more surface map images of the moon, with aerials of Tranquility Base etc, here:
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/
including some in anaglyphic stereo (red/blue glasses) that are cool to look at.
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11_eva_thumbs.html
By today's standards, these are fairly low resolution for such large format images. And as JPEGs, they contain compression artifacts. Somewhere NASA has higher-res scans in camera raw format. Those would be magnificent to look at.
I would think it's a Good size negative, 35mm may not cut the mustard.
All 122 Hasselblad camera pictures taken by the astronauts during the moonwalk are presented here. (Camera: 70mm. Lens: 60mm.)
I really liked that camera when I started out in photography. No need for an enlarger, that I didn't have anyway.
Modern *consumer* negative/slide scanners produce >3200 dpi, uninterpolated. That's a lot of pixels for a 65mm image. Pro scanners are even higher, especially with software interpolation.
Elsewhere on NASA's expansive site are much, MUCH higher resolution images of things. Their space colonies set, for example, is available for download at much higher resolutions than their public images of the Apollo missions, one of the most important scientific events in human history. I'm not exactly sure why this is. OTOH, I understand if you're doing research you can go into NASA and request these images at much higher resolutions.
I know I was never master at it, and going digital didn't help my ability to get a good exposure. But I was able to get some pretty unique shots with it during the time I did have it. Some of the aircraft at Frankfurt and Main airport during the seventies, planes in and out.
Europe in different sections, trouble was we decided to have it printed on the grainy paper back then. I'm pretty sure I have my negatives but not 100 percent.
He then gave me his old Contax 35mm reflex. It was completely manual. You even had to stop it down manually. What it did was teach me to memorize light and settings. After a while I got pretty good at it. I never used a light meter - didn't have one. As a result, even when I had a metered camera (mid 70s) I hardly paid any attention to the needle.
I took mostly pictures of my dog, some landscapes, and my favorite: long exposures during night time. I had my own enlarger by then, so I was developing the film and making prints. My first jobs as an adult were in camera stores (where we sold Petrie's, among others) and commercial darkrooms. I actually don't miss chemical photography. We have it much better these days.