Darren's Great Big Camera - Smarter Every Day 21

Today on Smarter Every Day, you're gonna learn about big rockets and big cameras. Is it going now? Woah! [Rushing air] Woohoo! Yeah! Oh! Hey, it's me, Destin. I'm at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center with my new friend Darren, who's got a great big camera. So I contacted him when I found out he was doing a road trip, and I knew a great big camera's needed to film great big things, and one of the coolest things in America is the Saturn V rocket. So Darren agreed. [Music]

(Darren) I had to do a lot of research before I could even build this camera. There are certain things that you have to know ahead of time, because you don't want to get to a point where you've invested time and money and then suddenly you realize that you've miscalculated, you know, the image circle for your lens, and suddenly, you're not covering the entire piece of film. So I had to do research on lenses - if they were big enough; which ones were big enough. I like detail, and I'm getting more detail than I think you can get with any digital camera, so... You know, when you got a piece of film that's 504 square inches, you get a lot of information from those photos.

Okay, we're gonna shoot f/90 this time.

(Destin) f/90? - Yeah. So I'm going to meter one more time, just to double-check. And I have 90 2/3 in 8 seconds. It's roughly... The numbers - the green numbers - are what I'm looking at. So 64 is here, but then we're going two more stops. You can see how... It's 64 and it keeps going. So that's 128. That's 90. Yeah, it was just a lot of calculations. Knowing how much chemistry to use to develop a sheet... a film that large. Um... and then also being able to calculate how much extra coverage I would have that would give me the... the movements that I would use on the camera. I had never had to really think about, you know, things like image circle and bellows draw. So there was a little bit of math that hadn't been used in a while.

I wanted to make every shot count, and now that I've got a 70-pound camera, it's more pressure, I suppose. But it's also more rewards, bigger rewards, so... The challenges are always part of the fun. [Motorcycle engine roaring]

Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.