The Cameras We Left on the Moon

The first time humans photographed themselves on the moon, they did it with a film camera.

In the summer of 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Most of us remember that moment through photographs. An astronaut beside the American flag, a boot print in gray dust, a second man reflected in a helmet. But not many people stop to think that every one of those historic images was shot on film. There was no digital back then. What went to the moon was a film camera.

The camera they took to the moon

The camera Apollo 11 used on the lunar surface was a Hasselblad: the silver Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC), a Swedish medium-format camera built to NASA specs, with a German Zeiss Biogon 60mm f5.6 lens. It had no viewfinder of the kind you put to your eye. The astronauts wore it on their chests and aimed by turning their whole bodies. No screen and no autofocus, obviously. Neil Armstrong carried it most of the time, so most of the moon pictures we know came from his hands.

Kodak 70mm, and the crosses in the pictures

The film was 70mm stock that Kodak made specially for the mission. With a thinner base, one load held 160 color frames or 200 black-and-white. Color was Ektachrome, black and white was Panatomic-X. Look closely at an Apollo photo and you'll see small crosses dotted all over the frame. A glass plate etched with a grid (the Réseau plate) sat in front of the film so that the distance and size of objects in the picture could be measured later. Those crosses were science, not decoration.

No light meter, just gut feel

Think about it and the conditions are brutal. Hands in thick gloves, no viewfinder to put your eye to, and an airless place where light and shadow split to extremes. The astronauts worked from exposure settings worked out in advance and pressed the shutter more or less by feel. The pictures they took that way are still, half a century later, some of the defining images of humankind. Is there a better example of how preparation and instinct, more than gear, make a photograph?

Leave the camera, bring the film

Here's my favorite part. On the way home, they ditched the camera bodies on the moon. All they brought back to Earth were the magazines with the film inside. The reason is simple: they had to shave every bit of weight they could off the return trip. The pictures were in the film, so who needed the body? From Apollo 11 to 17, twelve Hasselblads were left behind on the moon that way. Somewhere up there, the cameras humans first used to photograph themselves are still sitting right where they were left.

The weight of a single frame

We shoot and delete hundreds of pictures a day. They recorded humanity's farthest journey on the couple of hundred frames in a magazine. No rewinding, no previews. If you've ever wound a roll of film sparingly, you know a little of that tension. The story of the cameras left on the moon still gets to people because, in the end, it's a story from a time when every single frame was precious.

If you want to see for yourself

You can still look at those rolls today. Every film magazine Apollo shot on the moon has been scanned at high resolution and made public, crosses, slightly shaky frames and botched exposures included. Instead of a few perfectly curated hero shots, you get to flip through a whole roll from start to finish. The film that came back from the moon is there for us to wind through, one frame at a time.