I happened to see the lead image in nikonrumors weekly news flash, and I knew I had to click. I'm a self-admitted sucker for space photos, and this shot of Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko posing with all the gear I would love to have pulled me right in.
The thing about space is that there's a lot of it. Sure, you're stuck in this rather small collection of tubes with the same few people, sometimes for up to a year, and while I'm certain that a good bit of that starts to get repetitive, the photo opportunities seem to be endless. You have light that is literally out of this world. You have perspectives and angles and moments than only an extremely small number of people ever get to experience. I love seeing the work these astronauts produce, resulting in a mind-blowing number of over 2.5 MILLION photos taken in the 15 years that the ISS has been service. I think even Zenfolio would start to question me uploading 2.5 million images to my account, but that's just a guess. Their gear seems to be exclusively Nikon, with mosts shot being taken on the D3S and D4. Here are some of my favorite recent shots from the NASA Johnson Flickr account and don't worry, there's almost 50,000 more images where these came from.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22534954160
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22588197126
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22731569421
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22097677784
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22533845550
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22100428373
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22533904850
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22100761733
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22101064393
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22099839334
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/22889829352
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/21422622071
Pure awesomeness.
[Via NikonRumors & Flickr]
crazy photos
Man those are some insane shots... just imagine if they were shot on canon :P JK... but what an amazing perspective, that overhead shot of the city is spectacular... actually they are all spectacular.
Yep, just imagine if they were shot on Canons, they'd be noisy with no dynamic range. ;-)
I guess it irks Canon users that Nikon has ruled in space for 6 decades...
i also clicked this photo to find it a bit grainy and it got me wondering
but i checked the exif: f/11 @ ISO 14368
and it got me wondering...
I've got 513,000 images on my Zenfolio account and they haven't asked a question...... : )
Dadgum. I'm only at like 20k. I'm really bad about uploading to it though, so those are only client galleries. Everything else backs up to my RAID and Backblaze. I have a buddy who is the photographer for a local university and they store all of their images on Zen, He's probably close to our a little ahead of you. Thank God for unlimited plans!
I wonder how much training they get because I can't imagine a typical astronaut being able to pick up a Nikon D4s with a 600mm lens and being able to use it effectively without training.
That's a great question. I would imagine that they receive some pretty solid training purely based on the fairly consistent quality of photos from NASA throughout the years. Definitely worth looking into though. I'll ask around....
This gives a whole new perspective to location photography.
that long exposure shot is freakin epic!!!