Trick Shooting

No viewfinder at all is the real give-away, it was a "set up" which the chiefs at NASA obviously did not recognise.

Dark Moon, p. 49

Did you know that the Lunar Surface Camera had no viewfinder? That is the question rhetorically posed on the back cover of Dark Moon.

Actually, I didn't know that. Like any amateur photographer I've amputated my share of heads even with a viewfinder or SLR, and now that this digital age has spoiled us with real-time LCD screens, it does seem odd that the Apollo astronauts could take such lovely pictures without seeing what they were shooting. David Percy certainly thinks it's odd. Indeed, he thinks it's downright incriminating. As he put it,

[W]ithout a viewfinder or a television monitor it is very difficult (if not impossible) to know what is in the frame of an image.... [H]ow on earth--or rather on the Moon--did Armstrong manage to compose all those still photographs so well? How did he manage that? (Dark Moon, p. 40)

Now, David Percy is a Professional Photographer. He is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society. He was once nominated "Film Cameraman of the Year" by the British Industrial and Scientific Film Association. If he says something is impossible, then we had better believe him, right?

Well, shucks. I guess I'm just too ignorant to know what cannot be done. All I know is that the astronauts often mounted their cameras on chest brackets (as in this picture of Pete Conrad and Alan Bean practising sampling techniques for Apollo 12). So, just to see how difficult it was to take pictures this way, I held a camera against my chest and photographed myself in front of a mirror. And here's the result:

As long as you keep your head straight and employ some normal eye-hand coordination (something test pilots are very good at) then it's easy enough. One thing I learned is that, without the reference of a viewfinder, it's hard to keep the camera perfectly level with the ground. That's why these pictures turned out somewhat cockeyed--just like this one.

As I reply to this anti-Apollo nonsense I often find myself thinking like a lawyer, or at least like an Apollo denier. So I can imagine one of those people standing behind me as I wrote the above, and then jumping in to say, "Not so fast, smart guy. You had a visual reference--you could watch yourself and the camera in that mirror. But the astronauts didn't take mirrors to the Moon. How did they manage to shoot a really difficult scene, like a panorama? How did they do that?"

Now, that is tricky. Doing a panorama means keeping the camera at the same height throughout the sequence. After you take one picture, you have to turn the camera for the next one, not too far so you get a gap, but enough so you don't waste film. You have to do it a dozen times. The manuals recommend using a tripod.

Yet the astronauts took hundreds of panoramas, while holding the camera in pressurized gloves and, of course, no viewfinders. Percy on page 20 implies that it's another "impossible" task. My camera has a panorama feature that allows you to match up the previous picture, and even then it's awkward. But I didn't use that feature for my next experiment. I didn't even use the viewfinder. (Does anybody use the viewfinder on a digital camera?) Instead I stood in the middle of a park and, playing the camera close to my chest, got off this sequence. (You'll have to scroll sideways to see the whole thing.)

A few words about this picture are in order. The reason the bottom is so perfectly straight is that I cropped it (for aesthetic reasons and to spare you a huge download). However, the top half does show the edges of the separate pictures. (You have to look closely to make out the border against the cloudy white sky.) The uncropped sequence was quite raggedy--and so were the panoramas from Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and last but not least, 17. Indeed, their ragged borders were about what you might expect from photographers shooting freehand in pressure suits on an alien environment.

In summary, and in contrast to Percy's own summary on page 49, these still images do correspond to images taken without a viewfinder.

An obvious question is, how do you know I really did shoot that panorama freehand? How do you know I didn't cheat and use the viewfinder? The answer is, you don't. However, you can easily try taking some sightless pictures yourself; disposable cameras are cheap. Or you can save your money with a simple orientation test. Try standing with your eyes closed, and slowly turn around in 1/12th increments. (It might help to imagine your feet are the hands of a clock: first turn to the one o'clock position, then two o'clock, etc.) Do that 12 times and see if you have made a full 360° circle. If, when you open your eyes, you are facing the same direction you started from (and you probably will be), then you too can take pictures like the astronauts do.

On reflection, a viewfinder isn't really essential for shooting, pictures or other things. English longbowmen in 1415 shot down the French knights at Agincourt by sighting along the shafts of their arrows. And on another continent, Native Indians hunted buffalo while riding bareback on galloping ponies. Their bows didn't have telescopic sights, either. People with a lot of training and practice can perform amazing things, and it would be a mistake for Percy to assume that, just because he cannot do something, no one else can either.

Percy also implies that it would have been nearly impossible for the astronauts to set their cameras since they could not see the controls. Yet millions of people drive standard cars around the world without looking at the gearshift. (In some countries they do it left-handed). And before and since Apollo, astronauts in orbit took pictures with the same handicaps as the moonwalkers, and without benefit of gravity. And Percy accepts these orbital pictures as real. Handling awkward controls by feel through thick gloves would not be such a strange task for an experienced test pilot. And the guys who flew on Apollo were the very best.