Many Moon hoax proponents claim that there is evidence of blatant fakery in the photographs that NASA presented to the world over half a century ago. Most of these claims, however, are based on a lack of understanding of the basic principles of photography.
This is not really surprising, especially today, when many people have never used anything other than the fully automatic digital camera embedded in their mobile phone and therefore are unfamiliar with the technical issues of photography in general and know even less about the use, capabilities and limitations of chemical photography of the Sixties.
Today the concepts of not seeing a picture as soon as it is taken, of setting exposure and focus manually, of film sensitivity levels, and of dipping a strip of flexible film into chemicals in darkness to reveal a picture sound rather quaint and arcane, like a gramophone in the iPod era. Yet that’s how countless masterpieces of photography were taken for over a century and a half, and that’s how photographs were taken on the Moon trips.
Many of today’s young adults have never handled an actual professional camera (digital or otherwise) and often have no idea of what photographic film was. So I apologize in advance if some of the technical explanations seem rather dumbed down and pedantic.
