A NASA astronaut onboard the International Space Station (ISS) is taking a series of epic photographs and sharing the techniques behind them.
Matthew Dominick has captured clever selfies of himself zooming through the Destiny module, creative off-camera flash portraits of the crew, and epic photos of the Italian peninsula.
Dominick, who launched to the ISS on March 3 for six months as commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission, shares details on the equipment and settings he uses for his photography.
1/ A sliver of a moon rises out of noctilucent clouds and appears to look towards the horizon awaiting the imminent sunrise.
1/250s, f5.6, ISO 6400, 170mm (50 to 500mm lens), cropped pic.twitter.com/6vq9NfdXx0
— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) July 6, 2024
Getting Creative Onboard the ISS
On July 4, Independence Day, in-lieu of fireworks on the ISS Dominick shared a series of creative off-camera flash portraits, light painting multiple images of himself on a single exposure.
Happy 4th of July!
No fireworks on ISS so we used camera flashes instead. Experimented with “light painting” today.
15 sec, f22, 24mm, ISO 500. Turned off the lights. Manually actuated our own flashes. Ambient light only from computers and experiment LEDs.
1/ Floating through pic.twitter.com/fe8arQh3aJ
— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) July 4, 2024
Then he gave six crew members — including himself — a flash each to manually actuate for a funky group portrait.
Dominick also shared a clever selfie that blurs out the background of the ISS but he remains in focus. Achieved via a slow shutter speed of 1/5 of a second, the camera is attached to a pole that he is holding as he propels himself through the laboratory of the spaceship.

The astronaut also shared a shutter speed experiment he conducted while flying over Papua New Guinea. Keeping the ISO (6400) and aperture (f/1.4) constant, he changed the shutter speeds from ten seconds to a 1/4 of a second.
A common question theme when posting night time images from the ISS is exposure length. There are guidelines for shooting astrophotography from earth but what happens when shooting at orbital speeds? Thread shows images with 6400 ISO, f1.4, and exposures ranging from 10s to 1/4s pic.twitter.com/3YNwTeoOX7
— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) July 1, 2024
— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) July 1, 2024
Here are a few more awesome images taken by Dominick.




For more of his space photography, follow Dominick’s X page (formerly Twitter).
Image credits: Photographs by Matthew Dominick.