12. Special Shooting: Camera Features and Techniques for Specific Situations

At the end of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin blasted off from the moon in their tiny lunar module, aiming for a rendezvous with crew-mate Michael Collins in the orbiting Columbia service module. As the tiny speck of a spaceship rose up from the moon, ground controllers recorded Collins saying, “I got the Earth coming up behind you—it’s fantastic!” Back on Earth, after the rocks and space-suits and Hasselblad cameras were all unloaded, and the film was developed, Armstrong and Aldrin were able to see what Collins had been so excited about: a photograph of the earth rising above the moon, with the lunar lander flying close by in the foreground. In other words, a single picture encompassing all of humanity except for one man: Mike Collins, the photographer.