James McDivitt photographed Ed White’s first American successful EVA with great skill.
He also took the portrait of the first American spacewalker in weightlessness in the capsule, the first in-flight portrait of an astronaut, showing his face.
He used the Zeiss Contarex 35mm camera loaded with space-qualified color film that White carried during the EVA to take photographs from outside the spaceship.
“I was the happiest man in the world that day” said McDivitt, “except possibly for Ed.” White admitted, “I felt so good I didn’t know whether to hop, skip, jump, or walk on my hands” (National Geographic, September 1965, p. 447).
Astronaut White died two years later, with Astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom and Roger Chaffee, when fire swept the interior of an Apollo spacecraft at Cape Kennedy.