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"      Popular Mechanics: Did you have a chance to work with the camera before you got up there? Greg Johnson: I did. We saw the camera at Goddard before it was incorporated into Atlantis, and we actually had a chance to shoot a scene with it against the full mockup of the Hubble with spacewalkers inside in the neutral-buoyancy tank. [Director] Toni Myers took that scene and made it into 3D so we could see what the effect was and what our end product was going to be. I was the primary operator, and then the commander, Scott Altman, was the backup. Because they were trying to make a film out of it, it was important to get certain scenes, which were each between 20 and 30 seconds long. So those scenes were laid out in advance, and Toni trained us on that list and on the possible malfunctions that could occur. But like everything in space flight, things changed, so we would get an update every day with the scenes that we needed to shoot that day based on what we got or couldn&amp;#039;t get the day before.  PM: Did you have any experience with cameras before this? GJ: Not a lot. We get trained on cameras so I was the photo TV person for the flight, and everybody got trained on the hi-def camcorder. I was sort of the lead, so if they had questions on photo TV, I was the guy they came to.  PM: Does the camera have a steep learning curve, or was it easy to use? GJ: You&amp;#039;d think this was easy, and when I went into this, I was thinking, this will be fairly straightforward, I&amp;#039;ll just hit a button and it&amp;#039;ll take a scene. It was far more complicated than I thought. The camera was in the payload bay, aimed at Hubble. I had to select the lens, the focal length and the f-stop using a laptop inside of Atlantis.  PM: What were some of the biggest challenges when it came to operating the camera? GJ: Lighting was a large challenge because there is a sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes as you orbit around the Earth. We didn&amp;#039;t really want to shoot within 10 minutes of sunrise and sunset, because the light was changing too rapidly. So we had a map of the world and a counter that said sunrise is going to occur at this time and sunset will occur at this time.  Essentially the way it worked was, we saw when the scene was coming up, and we&amp;#039;d shoot the light meter and set that number into the computer. Then we would select the lens. The scene list had a suggested lens, but we were free to select a different one. The suggested lens in general was 40-mm, not real closeup. If you were over an interesting look of the Earth, then you might want to select the 30-mm when you could see Africa or the Amazon or the Nile. But I varied from 40 to 30 probably three or four times because I thought the Earth in the background was a better scene. The closeup 60-mm was for very few shots.  The last factor was focal-distance choice. In other words, what is our distance from the lens to the primary person in the scene? We couldn&amp;#039;t have anything out of focus close to us. Because if you&amp;#039;ve ever seen a 3D film, the things that are close to you that jump out at you have to be in focus, because that&amp;#039;s where your eye goes. If you have something close to you, then your eye sees that, and if it&amp;#039;s out of focus, that&amp;#039;s not normal.  But the biggest challenge was deciding when the scene would actually start, because we&amp;#039;re not directing the spacewalker to change out a rate-sensor unit. They do it per their timeline. We&amp;#039;re supposed to just film it. Many things in space happen fairly slowly. There&amp;#039;s only 8 minutes of film\u2014though that film is about a mile long\u2014so you didn&amp;#039;t want to start to film only to shoot 10 seconds of nothing happening. And then when we hit the button, it didn&amp;#039;t immediately start to film, so there was a delay of 3 or 4 seconds before the film started rolling. Predicting the timing of when the scene actually occurred was tricky.       PM: The astronauts didn&amp;#039;t have any signals they could give you when a particular scene was coming up? GJ: No. Our agreement with Imax was that this couldn&amp;#039;t interrupt our primary job, which was fixing Hubble. There is one scene where [astronaut] Drew Feustel is parallel to the Earth on the end of the robotic arm, and he knew we were trying to get that on film. If we moved the arm in a way that wasn&amp;#039;t obvious to him, he knew that would be okay. He wouldn&amp;#039;t say, &amp;quot;Why are you taking me down? I need to get going here!&amp;quot; PM: Were you nervous while you were up there? GJ: I don&amp;#039;t normally get nervous, but in some of those scenes, I would rather have been in a head-to-head dogfight in F-18s then shoot the scene because it was, you know\u2014&amp;quot;The movie is going to be no good if I don&amp;#039;t shoot these scenes right.&amp;quot; The commander and I would try to agree upon when to start the camera. Envision this: He is looking out the aft light deck, and I&amp;#039;m crouched down at a laptop, looking at the scene on the display. So I can see what&amp;#039;s happening, but not as quickly as he can because he has the whole real scene in the view. So I&amp;#039;m sort of floating up to look at the scene, floating back to the laptop. Occasionally he&amp;#039;d say, &amp;quot;Okay, start the camera.&amp;quot; And I&amp;#039;d float up and say &amp;quot;Not yet!&amp;quot; Nervous may be the wrong answer but I was definitely on my game trying to assimilate what the director told me she wanted for the movie. It was trying to become a director when I wasn&amp;#039;t a director.  PM: How did filming fit in with your regular duties? GJ: The autopilot was going while we were shooting. Between the commander and me, we were putting the Hubble in a sun-protected attitude so that no sunlight got inside the telescope, and that required changing attitudes periodically. I also had to take about 1300 physical photos of Hubble to document what shape it was in\u2014if it hit any micrometeorite orbital debris, that kind of thing. So I was doing that and then keeping track of Atlantis to make sure that the whole space shuttle orbiter was working correctly. But I would get notice 20 minutes before a scene was coming up, and then I&amp;#039;d work my duties in between that.  PM: Would you do something like this again? GJ: I&amp;#039;d be happy to do it. I think everyone will be happy with the final product; I think we were successful in assimilating the director&amp;#039;s thoughts. That probably took more time than you might guess, because I&amp;#039;m not a director in real life\u2014for goodness&amp;#039; sake, I was a jet pilot and a fighter pilot! Turning me into an Imax operator took a little time, but I think they were successful. But I&amp;#039;ll let everybody judge for themselves when they see it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/telescopes/a6360/the-cinematographer-astronaut/>