Mike Jackson, a student in the Samford After Sundown photography courses, recently traveled to Florida on two separate occasions to photograph the launch of the space shuttle. His comments about his experience as well as a description of the two photographs are below: “The night photo is of the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-128 going to the space station that was launched near midnight Friday, August 29, 2009. The day photo is of the Space Shuttle Atlantis mission STS-129 going to the space station that launched Monday, November 16, 2009 at 2:28 pm EST. Both launched from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Both pictures were taken from the KSC press site that is about 3 miles from the launch pad. I was engaged by a company to take the pictures after a friend who works with a technical services company learned that I had taken the Samford SAS photography classes. Shuttle launch photography is all manual and unique. A NASA video engineer helped me learn how to set up the camera for the launch. If I had not taken the SAS photography classes that taught the physics behind the camera settings and how to actually get the settings on my Nikon D90 I would not have understood what the engineer was telling me. Thank you Mike Neilson for the great instruction!“
For more information about Samford After Sundown go to http://www4.samford.edu/sundown/
