In the past, there was a change in lubricants, but it was determined
that the modification is no longer needed. They did modify one of
the Nikons–I think it was the D2–to take imagery in the near IR by
having the IR filter removed from the chip.
There are also probably 20 Canon XF305 cameras on board
for video.
Every module has one of them stuck to a wall with a cable
running out linking video down to the ground. Then, they have
a few free-floating ones that you can shoot with. When I was
there, I was fortunate to shoot footage for DP James Neihouse
for the IMAX film “A Beautiful Planet,” including a sequence
of stills at four frames a second using the Canon EOS-1D C
DSLR that was converted into 24-frames-per-second video. We
also used a Canon EOS C500. For the IMAX project, they had
hard drives that we would fill up and send back down to Earth
on a cargo ship.
We also had the first-ever RED Dragon on board. But they
warned us, “The files are too big, be careful what you shoot, we’ll
never be able to downlink it,” since bandwidth is pretty limited.
After a few months, I got the RED out, which at the time was the
first 4K in space, and spent a whole weekend shooting a terabyte
of video.
Left: A crescent moon setting above Earth’s thin blue atmosphere.
Below: France at night from the International Space Station. digitalphotopro.com July/August 2019 | 31