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Background:
Bill
Wood took the photographs in this section on July 4, 1969, during a visit by
Walter Cronkite and his CBS News film crew to the Goldstone area in preparation
for the Apollo 11 flight to the Moon.
At the time Mr. Wood was assigned to the NASA Manned Space Flight
Network Apollo tracking station at Goldstone, California as a Unified S-band
Lead Engineer. Since his hobby was photography the NASA Station Director, George
Farris, asked him to shoot a few pictures of the CBS crew’s visit.
Mr. Wood used two Nikon F, 35-mm single-lens reflex, cameras.
One was loaded with Kodak Plus-X black and white film while the second used
Kodak Ektacolor S color negative film. A number of different lenses were used,
from 28 mm to a 500-mm telephoto.
Copies of the black and white photographs were provided to Goddard
Space Flight Center and Bendix Field Engineering for use in their respective
employees’ newsletters in 1969. At the same time black and white copies
were provided to Ron Bonn, the producer who worked with Walter Cronkite and
the CBS News crew during the Goldstone visit.
As part of a personal project to convert his photographic archive
to digital images, Mr. Wood recently scanned the original black & white
and color negatives from 1969. He used a high resolution Kodak RFS 3570 professional
film scanner. Each of the images here was derived from 2048 by 3072 pixel, 36
bit color originals, each some 18 megabytes in size.
Each image was processed by Adobe Photoshop version 4.0 on a
Gateway2000 G6-200XL Pentium Pro workstation running Windows 95. The color images
were carefully adjusted for color balance and dynamic range. Both color and
black and white images were digitally retouched to remove pinholes and other
artifacts before saving each image on a hard disk in a 24 bit JPEG high resolution
format. The high-resolution color images (available on request) are about 3 to 4 MB
in size while the low-resolution copies run about 600 KB in size.
None of the original photographs have been copyrighted and Bill
Wood has released all into the public domain. All reproduction rights have been
waived.
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Apollo page.
