Bill Ingalls: The Right Stuff: Continuing a NASA Legacy
Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls
The archive staff uses five dual-processor Power Mac G5s to offload and batch-process photographs and do image-editing using Photoshop. They also scan negatives and transparencies into the Macs using Nikon scanners. For printing, they forward files to two dual-processor Power Mac G5s attached to ultra-high-resolution Fuji Pictrography digital printers. “Images are printed on demand,” Ingalls says. “Almost everything we send to the press is electronic.”
The Need for Speed
About four years ago, Ingalls began shooting digitally once camera resolution improved and prices came down — and when digital cameras could handle the shutter speeds launch events require. “When you’re shooting a launch, a digital camera needs to shoot five frames per second for 20 or 40 frames without stopping. The original digital cameras would shoot one or two frames and then you’d have to stop for ten seconds. We can’t do that, because by then the launch is over,” he laughs.
On the road, Ingalls offloads images into his PowerBook G4. “But I don’t feel comfortable having all my pictures just in one place,” he says. “So if I haven’t had time to burn a CD and if I have room on my iPod, I’ll connect that as an external drive and make duplicates on that, as well. I’ve also used the [iPod] Belkin card reader to offload images in emergencies. More importantly, though, I use the iPod for music when I’m working on my pictures. I love it.”
“I feel I have a huge responsibility. That is, to record events and tell a story for the thousands of people who could not be there. I am their eyes.”
When it’s time to show images to the world, Ingalls uses .Mac’s HomePage to make quick and easy slideshows while on location. This is especially handy when he’s shooting in Russia and wants, as a courtesy, to post images for friends and family members of the flight crews. For security reasons, these individuals can’t log on to the NASA FTP site. So at the same time Ingalls uploads images to NASA’s FTP site in Washington, he creates .Mac homepages that anyone in the world with an Internet connection can view. “An FTP site isn’t sexy, and you’ve got to download and look at everything individually,” he says. “The .Mac site is quick, it has a good look to it, and they can look at a slide show in the same time I take to do the FTP upload. I’m not a web designer, so I love the templates.”
A Huge Responsibility
Because space exploration is such an important and beloved part of American history, Ingalls finds himself shouldering the same pressure as his predecessor. Bill Taub clearly understood the gravitas behind every image he shot, and Ingalls does, too. For whoever records historic moments on film, there’s the challenge of telling a story in a way that grabs people viscerally and makes them feel proud. And, to the people involved in the projects, the images need to reflect the time and care and sweat and hundreds of sleepless nights — and sometimes lives lost — that make the impossible into reality and further the understanding of the unknown.
“I feel I have a huge responsibility,” says Ingalls. “That is, to record events and tell a story for the thousands of people who could not be there. I am their eyes. I often think that when my time is up on this planet, I will have hopefully left behind some good images so that future generations will be able see what I’ve seen during my lifetime.”
