The masters

Ed White's spacewalk, 1965

Photographer: James McDivitt · Camera: modified Hasselblad 500C · Mission: Gemini IV, 3 June 1965

The first American to float outside a spacecraft was photographed by his crewmate through the open hatch. It's often called the first still photograph of a person in open space. White carried a small 35 mm camera of his own on his maneuvering gun, but this is McDivitt's frame.

Earthrise, 1968

Photographer: Bill Anders · Camera: modified Hasselblad 500 EL, 250 mm lens · Film: 70 mm Kodak Ektachrome · Exposure: 1/250 at f/11 · Mission: Apollo 8, 24 December 1968

Anders was photographing the lunar surface on black-and-white film when the spacecraft rolled and the Earth came over the horizon. "Oh my God, look at that picture over there!" he said, and asked for color film. Frank Borman pointed out that it wasn't on the schedule; Jim Lovell found a color magazine and passed it over. Anders took two frames. This is the second.

The long lens matters. At 250 mm, the Earth and the Moon's horizon are flattened onto one plane, which makes the Earth look large and close against the rim. A wider lens would have shown a tiny blue dot.

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, 1969

Photographer: Neil Armstrong · Camera: Hasselblad Electric Data Camera, chest-mounted, Zeiss Biogon 60 mm · Mission: Apollo 11, 20 July 1969

Look in Aldrin's visor and you'll see the photographer, with the camera strapped to his chest. Armstrong took nearly all the photographs on the surface, which is why there are so few good pictures of the first man on the Moon. The small crosses scattered over the frame were etched on a glass plate in front of the film, so scientists could measure distances in the pictures afterwards.

The film came home. The cameras didn't: to save weight, the astronauts brought back only the magazines, and left the camera bodies and lenses on the surface. Hasselblad says twelve of its cameras are still on the Moon.

The Blue Marble, 1972

Photographers: the Apollo 17 crew · Camera: Hasselblad 500 EL, 80 mm Zeiss Planar · Mission: Apollo 17, 7 December 1972

About five hours after launch, with the Sun behind the spacecraft, the crew saw the Earth fully lit for the first time, including the ice cap at the South Pole. It's usually credited to Harrison Schmitt, though the Apollo Flight Journal points to Ron Evans, and NASA credits all three.

It was made with an 80 mm lens, the same focal length as yours. You'll sometimes see an exposure of f/2.8 at 1/250 quoted for it. There's no NASA source for that, and it would have overexposed a sunlit Earth by several stops, which is a good reminder to check a famous number before you repeat it.

Bruce McCandless flies free, 1984

Photographer: Robert "Hoot" Gibson · Camera: Hasselblad, 70 mm · Mission: Space Shuttle STS-41B, 7 February 1984

The first untethered spacewalk was photographed through the Shuttle's rear windows by a pilot who had nothing else to do during it. Gibson took his job seriously: NASA's account says he metered three times and checked focus four times for every frame, and tilted the camera to level the horizon, which he thought looked wrong at an angle. Careful technique, not luck, is why these frames are so clean.

Ansel Adams, Moon and Half Dome, 1960

Camera: Hasselblad 500C, 250 mm Zeiss Sonnar · Place: Yosemite Valley, 28 December 1960, late afternoon

Adams is best known for big view cameras, but he was also one of Victor Hasselblad's earliest supporters. After the first Hasselblad appeared in 1948, he offered to test it, and he sent the company notes on its design for years. In 1960 he saw a gibbous moon rising over Half Dome as the shadow climbed its face, and made this picture with a long lens, lifting the mirror before he released the shutter so its jolt couldn't blur the frame. That's the pre-release you practiced on the bench.

In the Yosemite fieldwork you can try the same kind of picture yourself.

Iain Macmillan, Abbey Road, 1969

Camera: Hasselblad 500C, reported 50 mm Distagon · Place: Abbey Road, London, 8 August 1969

Paul McCartney sketched the idea, a policeman held up the traffic, and Macmillan stood on a stepladder in the middle of the road. He made six frames in about ten minutes. The fifth was the one where the four men's legs made a clean, even stride. When his camera was sold at auction in 2020, it still had lines drawn on its focusing screen to match the zebra crossing, so he could line the picture up on the ground glass. The square frame went straight onto a square record sleeve.

Robert Mapplethorpe, from 1975

Camera: a Hasselblad 500, a gift from Sam Wagstaff in 1975

Mapplethorpe made more than 1,500 Polaroids before Wagstaff gave him a Hasselblad. After that, the Polaroids gave way to the work he's known for: precise, carefully lit square pictures of flowers, portraits and the figure. The camera's square frame and big negative suited his classical, centered compositions and his large prints.

Lee Friedlander, from the 1990s

Camera: Hasselblad Superwide (SWC), with a fixed 38 mm Biogon

Friedlander spent decades with a Leica. In the early 1990s, wanting to photograph the landscape of the American West, he tried a Hasselblad Superwide, a V-system camera with a very wide fixed lens and no mirror, and he soon used it for everything. MoMA points to the much bigger negative and the unusually sharp, wide lens. His book America by Car is a long sequence of square pictures made from the driver's seat of rental cars, the dashboard and mirrors framing the road.

Michael Kenna, from 1987

Camera: Hasselblad with a waist-level finder

Kenna bought his first Hasselblad, with a waist-level finder like yours, in 1987. He has said that looking down at a reversed image on the ground glass, with the camera held low, changed the way he composes. His quiet, square black-and-white landscapes, often exposed for many minutes at night, are almost all made this way. "I work with Hasselblads most of the time," he told one interviewer.