I saw this on EODetective‘s twitter account – an interview with Tim Peake about the process behind the astronaut’s photography generated on board the ISS. I’ve actually used a strip of them before to make a photogrammetric model of Italy, and was very curious about the process behind their capture.
Interesting to see they use unmodified Nikon D4s – I was curious about why they were using a relatively small aperture (f/11) for the capture of the images I had downloaded, and while ISO was mentioned I’m still left wondering. I guess they don’t really think about it as they are very busy throughout the day, though he did mention they leave them in fully automatic most of the time. While you could potentially get better quality images from setting a wider aperture, as per DxoMark’s testing on 24 mm lenses, I’m guessing the convenience of using fully-auto settings outweigh the cost.
But that’s not really in the spirit of the interview, which is more to get a general sense of life aboard the ISS.
A sample image from the ISS
Photogrammetry, Science and opinion 