With the Nikons, I
would shoot in RAW, plus
JPEG to a CF card, then
download and transmit
RAW images and use the
JPEGs for social media
from space.
What lenses did you
have on the space
station to work with for your
still photography?
Four or five prime NIKKOR lenses,
as well as an 8mm fish-eye and an
800mm and a teleconverter. Also, I
used a 24-70mm f/2.8, 70-200mm f/2.8,
14-24mm f/2.8 and 17-35mm f/2.8
zooms, among others.
How did you record
your spacewalks?
It was hard to use the Nikon D2 with
pressurized gloves on, but the protec-
tive thermal blanket container that you
put the camera in had a bigger shutter
button on it to depress.
There was a little LED light on the
back that came on showing a busy sig-
nal, so you could tell that it worked.
We also had a GoPro, which was
actually owned by the Russians. They
built a box—a thermal blanket for it to
protect it in case it got too crazy hot or
cold. It also kept it pressurized.
I borrowed it from the Russians for
all three of my spacewalks. Toni Myers,
the director of “A Beautiful Planet,”
put together a really nice montage of
my spacewalking just with a GoPro.
We also had a Ghost that could fit in
your palm but is really high quality and
could do time-lapse, stills or video.
Are you weightless the whole
time you’re circling around
the Earth?
From the moment the engines shut
down! You launch, and then eight-
and-a-half minutes later the engines
shut down, and you’re in space. When
you come back to Earth—on my last
flight it was 200 days later—as soon as
you hit the atmosphere, you start feel-
ing gravity again.Once you’re in orbit on the space
station, how fast are you travel-
ing and how does that affect your
shutter speed when you want to
freeze an image of the Earth?
It’s about 17,500 miles an hour. In day-
light, it’s not a problem, you’re a few
hundred miles away. If you were a mile
away, it would be nothing but blur.
So in daylight, your shutter speeds are
1/500th or a 1/1000th of a second at 100
or 200 ISO.
It depends on what you’re shooting
and what your aperture is. I will say
this: During the day, it’s the brightest
bright you’ve ever seen, and at night,
it’s the darkest dark you’ve ever seen. So
you have to push the ISO.
A lot of my Nikon stuff was ISO 6400.
On the Canons, I would often use ISO
10,000. You need to get city lights, the
aurora or stars. Even at those speeds, you
have to slow your shutter speed down as
well as use a fast prime lens pretty wide
open. You’re down to a 1/15th or a 1/8th
of a second. The camera is on a bracket,
so you’re not tracking the target. All
those parameters are on the edge of blur.What type of window were you
shooting through when you
were not out on a spacewalk?
The Russians have pure glass on their
side, but they don’t protect them very
well, so they are super scratched up. The
U.S. segment has two different windows.
The one in the lab is a window made of
pure scientific-grade glass. Whenever
you’re down in that lab window area,you have to wear a mask. We
go to a lot of effort to protect
it. There’s a cover on the out-
side that you only open up
when you’re actually taking
pictures so that the fuel from
cargo ships or little meteor-
ites flying around out there
doesn’t scratch it up.
The cupola is a module I
installed on my STS-130 shuttle flight
in 2010, and it’s got seven windows.
Frankly, it’s the coolest place in space!
It also has covers, but usually, we leave
them open all day.Did you get motion sickness?
I think everybody feels bad the first
day or two you’re in space, either dizzy,
have motion sickness or your back hurts
because you’re stretching out. My first
two days, I had a raging headache. But
after a couple of days, everybody adjusts
and gets better.How do you photograph inside
the space station? What’s the
Kelvin temperature in there?
We have a Nikon Speedlight and also
battery-powered Litepanels that were
used in constructing the portable light
we call “bricks” because of their size
and shape. The U.S. segment was
roughly 5500K, and the Russian seg-
ment was roughly 3700K.Did you ever see anything
going by that couldn’t
be explained?
Not really. But I did see amazing things
that I never knew existed on Earth or
in space.
For instance, over the planet, there’s
a thing called airglow. It sort of looks
like an aurora, but it’s not. It’s just that
the normal high upper-level atmo-
sphere sometimes has this thin uniform
straight green glow to it.
When you get to the Northern Lights
or the Southern Lights, where the mag-
netic poles are—then that’s the aurora,
that green is from the sun’s radiation“One of the profound
things...is that when you
see those city lights, you’re
not seeing population,
you’re seeing wealth.”
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