I spend a lot of time obsessing over my camera gear. Usually, I am worrying about completely mundane things, like whether my favorite rangefinder is going to survive a slightly damp hike, or if I remembered to pack enough batteries for an afternoon out. But every once in a while, I catch myself looking at those iconic photos from the Apollo moon missions, and my brain just kind of short-circuits. Humans actually went to the moon, and they managed to take perfectly exposed, critically sharp, absolutely beautiful medium format film photos while they were up there.

It is genuinely wild when you stop and think about the logistics. They were working in zero gravity, standing in a vacuum, wearing incredibly bulky spacesuits, and dealing with some of the harshest lighting conditions imaginable. The gear they used to document the journey had to be absolutely flawless. Today, I want to talk about the cameras that made the trip, because the story behind them is every bit as fascinating as the spacecraft itself.

The Reluctant Start of NASA's Camera Program

NASA wasn't always obsessed with top-tier photography. In the early days of the Mercury program, they mostly viewed cameras as a trivial distraction from the complex engineering required to keep humans alive in space. Astronauts were given a pretty basic, heavily modified Ansco point-and-shoot, which was fine for quick snapshots, but it didn't exactly produce museum-quality fine art.

That all changed in 1962 because of an astronaut named Wally Schirra. Wally was a massive camera nerd. Before his Mercury-Atlas 8 mission, he walked into a camera shop in Houston and bought a Hasselblad 500C. He brought it to the NASA engineers and basically said, "We need to figure out how to take this up there." They agreed, stripped off the leather covering to save weight and prevent outgassing, and painted the body black to reduce reflections. When Wally brought his film back to Earth, the images were so breathtakingly crisp that NASA immediately realized the scientific and public relations value of taking real, professional-grade cameras into space. From that moment on, Hasselblad became the unofficial camera of the space program.

Building the Ultimate Moon Camera: The Hasselblad 500 EL

By the time the Apollo missions rolled around, a standard Hasselblad wasn't going to cut it. Strolling on the surface of the moon is vastly different from floating inside a confined capsule. The astronauts were going to be wearing fully pressurized space suits with massive, stiff gloves. If you've ever tried to shoot medium format in the winter with thick mittens on, you know where this is going.

NASA worked directly with Hasselblad to create the Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC), which was a heavily modified version of the motorized Hasselblad 500 EL. They needed the electric motor because cocking a manual shutter and winding film with those pressurized gloves was physically impossible. The standard waist-level viewfinder was entirely removed—you obviously can't press a camera up to your eye when you are wearing a bulky spherical space helmet.

The external modifications were just as extreme. Instead of the usual sleek black or chrome finish, the lunar cameras were painted a bright silver. Because there is no atmosphere on the moon to scatter the sun's rays, the temperature swings are vicious. The silver finish reflected the harsh solar radiation so the camera wouldn't literally bake from the inside out. They also added massive custom levers to the shutter button and aperture rings so the astronauts could make adjustments just by sweeping their clumsy gloved hands against the lens barrel.

Glass Made for a Vacuum: The Zeiss Lenses

A camera body is only as good as the glass in front of it, and for Apollo, NASA relied on Carl Zeiss. The primary lens used on the lunar surface was a specially designed Biogon 60mm f/5.6. The engineers chose this focal length because it provided a perfect wide-to-normal field of view, ideal for capturing the vast emptiness of the moonscapes while keeping everything in sharp focus.

One of the most defining characteristics of the lunar photos comes from a brilliant piece of engineering called a Réseau plate. If you look closely at photos taken on the moon, you'll notice a grid of tiny crosshairs covering the image. These aren't glitches or watermarks. The Réseau plate was a glass sheet set right against the film plane inside the camera, with those crosshairs precisely engraved into it. Because the extreme temperatures of space could potentially warp the film stock slightly, scientists back on Earth needed a way to measure any distortion. The crosshairs allowed them to calculate exact distances and sizes of craters and rocks, turning breathtaking photos into precise topographical maps.

Thin Film and Harsh Light: Kodak's Contribution

Reloading a camera on the moon wasn't really an option, so they needed to carry as much film as possible in a single magazine. Kodak stepped up and engineered a custom 70mm film stock right onto an incredibly thin base. By making the actual film thinner, they managed to cram about 200 exposures into a single film back.

They shot on two primary film stocks: a custom Panatomic-X for black-and-white scientific shots, and an Ektachrome color reversal film. If you've ever shot positive slide film like Ektachrome, you know it is notoriously unforgiving. If you are off by even half a stop, your highlights blow out or your shadows turn into muddy black voids. Now imagine trying to perfectly expose slide film on the moon. There is no atmospheric diffusion, meaning the sun is blindingly bright, and the shadows are pitch black. The dynamic range is absolutely punishing.

Shooting Blind

Because they didn't have a viewfinder and couldn't lift the cameras to their faces, the astronauts relied on a dedicated mounting system right on the chest plates of their spacesuits. To take a photo, an astronaut had to point their entire body at the subject. They couldn't focus the lens visually, so they relied on zone focusing—estimating the distance to a subject and setting the lens to a predetermined distance bracket.

As for exposure? They literally had a cheat sheet printed and stitched onto their thick suit gloves. It told them exactly what aperture and shutter speed to use depending on the sun angle. They practiced in the deserts of the American Southwest for months, just wandering around in mock suits learning the muscle memory required to aim from the chest and accurately guess exposure and distance. The fact that the photos turned out so beautifully is a massive testament to their training and skill as photographers.

The Most Expensive Litter in the Universe

Here is the part of the story that always breaks my heart just a little bit. When it was time to leave the moon and return to the command module, weight was the great enemy. Every single ounce of fuel mattered, and the astronauts had collected hundreds of pounds of invaluable moon rocks that needed to make the trip back to Earth.

To free up space and weight, they had to leave almost everything non-essential behind. They popped the film magazines off the back of the Hasselblads, safely stowed the precious negatives... and then literally tossed the camera bodies and those pristine Zeiss lenses into the lunar dust. Right now, there are exactly twelve beautifully modified, silver Hasselblad 500-series cameras sitting quietly on the surface of the moon, right where the astronauts left them.

Bring a Little Moon Magic to Your Own Kit

We might not be able to catch a ride to the Sea of Tranquility to pick up those abandoned cameras, but you can absolutely experience the magic of the same era of photography today. You don't need a million dollars or a spacesuit to feel the heavy, mechanical satisfaction of these systems. If you're ready to slow down and really think about your shots the way the Apollo crews had to, I highly recommend looking into outfitting your own setup. You can browse our collection to find incredible medium format cameras that operate with that same beautiful analog precision. And since you won't have an exposure cheat sheet sewn into a spacesuit glove, picking up a reliable light meter is a great way to ensure your shots hit perfectly every time.

Looking back at the Apollo gear serves as an amazing reminder of what simple, mechanical photography is capable of. No auto-focus, no digital screens, no artificial intelligence. Just some brilliant engineers, incredibly brave astronauts, and a whole lot of math, proving that if you understand the fundamentals of light, you can take a good photo absolutely anywhere in the universe.