system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How did they get, and keep, the footage of the atomic bomb tests?

You've seen the footage: those orange-red tinged shots of the car and bus being blasted across the desert, the shockwave hitting the trees and making a "forest" shimmy, and the house blistering into ashes.

So with all these thermonuclear torments, how the the camera stay trained on the spot, and how did the film not vaporize?  What about retrieval?  Don't get me wrong, I'm not some truther who's trying to say it wasn't real or the Freemasons did it (we had a pancake breakfast that day so we're good on alibis), or any such nonsene.  Just curious.

Was camera tech good enough back then to have super long-range zoom?  With the terrible force and energy, the shockwave pushing out and the negative pressure return wave what was used to stabilize the image?  How was the recording possible with the presence of EMP?
gpt
First of all: for most shots of the blasts themselves, the camera was with the human observers i.e. sufficiently far enough away to be safe from massive shockwaves. Zoom lenses did not need to be super zooms, given the sizes of the explosions. Some cameras were put in massively heavy enclosures to survive being closer e.g. to capture the shock wave effects on structures and animals. You can design such things if you have an estimate of the conditions, which they did. 

Plus: who's claiming that no cameras or film were ever destroyed? I'd be very surprised if that never happened!