That's a pretty good response.
All pictures do not appear flawless. There are many examples of sunstruck frames, exposure problems, lens flares, and focus problems. There is an entire roll in one of the J-missions that is overexposed by a stop.
Viewfinder, schmiewfinder. I used the Hasselblad MK/70 (equivalent to the EL/500) and the 38mm lens without a viewfinder and I had no problem framing shots.
There really wasn't a lot of tweaking necessary for the camera settings. Generally they left the shutter speed at 1/250 or 1/125, for which there were three predetermined f-stop settings cued by a placard on the magazine. The focus detents were present at 1 meter, 10 meters, 30 meters, and inifinity. Zone focusing, common in journalism. The lens rings had paddles to allow easy manipulation in space gloves. Again, I had no problem at all, and that was on a cantankerous 40-year-old relic lens.
On those issues the conspiracy theorists are handwaving. They've obviously never tried it, so they just assume for everyone that it would be a problem.
Studies like that misinterpret the notion of what an average is. If I have five people whose heights in meters are, respectively, 1.34, 1.41, 2.11, 2.05, and 1.95, the "average" height of that group is 1.77, which isn't the height of any of the five. In fact, the 1.41m person is 36 cm shorter than average and the 1.95 m person is 18 cm taller. And those are the most "medial" of the group. The shortest and tallest people are considerably shorter and taller than the average.
In fact Apollo photographs were taken in bursts, as you mention. If an astronaut fires off a pan of 10 shots in 15 seconds, he can go ten minutes thereafter without taking a single picture, and still preserve the average. The argument above makes it sound like the astronaut had to stop every minute and take a picture.
It's not strictly true that the photography took place "in addition to" all the crew's other activities. In most cases the astronauts were expected to document photographically what they were doing. So while setting up the ALSEP, for example, one person might do the lion's share of the actual setting-up, while the other is standing back a ways and photographing every 30 seconds or so.
It all amounts to begging the question. The poster wants you to accept his interpretation of the role of photography, and accept that his mathematical model of photographic behavior relates in any way to how the photos were actually taken.
|