IMAGING THE WORLD:

I am a professional astronomer, and I love photography. I like going out with my camera, capturing actions, moments and places that tell us about life and the world around us. With a telescope, I am able to capture the photons coming from distant objects outside our home planet to study them; with my photo equipment, I am able to capture forever a singular, unique instant in the life of our world. In 1989 I got my first camera, a 110 Instamatic camera. Since then, I started doing still photography using both color transparency and negative films. In the early 90s I got my first SLR 35 mm film camera, a Minolta X-300S. In 2004 I got my first SLR digital camera, the Nikon D70. And in November 2010 I added a new Digital SLR camera to my equipment: the Nikon D7000 (years later I got a second D7000 camera body). Although I essentially do digital photography these days, one of my dreams has been to go back to traditional film photography with a Hasselblad medium-format SLR camera. In July 2017 I acquired a Hasselblad 500 EL/M, the so called "moon camera", with a 70mm and a couple of 120-film (A12 and A24) magazines. The 500 EL/M is an icon in photography as a significantly modified (by NASA requirements) version of it became the camera that Apollo astronauts used on the lunar surface from the Apollo 12 mission on. The 500 EL/M is in fact an already modified version of the 500 EL camera that was adapted to be used in the Apollo 11 mission. In 2021 I started a project to try to recreate the Apollo 11 Hasselblad Electric Data Camera from a real Hasselblad 500 EL that I acquired for this purpose. The project successfuly concluded one year later. However, to try to keep up with technological progress, in 2018 I made a slight upgrade to my photographic gear by acquiring a Nikon D7200 body. The objectives I use (depending on camera and needs) span the range 18mm-300mm, in addition to a 500mm mirror lens and a 8mm fisheye lens.

Besides traditional day-time photography, I have been getting practice at doing night-time photography, particularly astrophotography. This is perfect during long-time integrations at the telescope! One of the techniques that I have been exploring in the context of astrophotography is time-lapse photography, which allows me to capture the motion of the sky (actually the Earth) during the night.

Main Collection (restricted and outdated) | Sample Photos | Astrophotography
Timelapse | Air & Space

All photographs © R. Demarco, 2004-2023

The photographer (me) with the Hasselblad 500 EL/M.
Credits: Isabel Rivera (© 2018; left image) and Horst von Irmer (© 2019; center and right images)