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Not true. The cameras were encased in a special enclosure. Have you ever seen an underwater enclosure for cameras?

Yeah, it's plastic with rubber seals. Last about thirty seconds on the moon before melting, freezing and then cracking into dust.

There's a link to a discussion of the moon camera on ansel's post #17.

If you want to comment without just making things up, that'd be great.

I didn't say the Apollo cameras were in underwater housings. The housings were obviously made for the lunar environment. It was an easy matter for NASA engineers to make housings akin to underwater housings. Details are available on the Internet if you would just do a search. The Hasselblad film cameras were not off-the-shelf either. They were hardened for the lunar application.

Vacuum is must easier to make a seal for than underwater devices since vacuum is only 15psi less than what we normally experience rather than hundreds or thousands of PSI at water depth. If we can seal underwater devices, we can seal for space. Lunar temperatures are hot, but not like an iron foundry.

Environmental conditions for the cameras was the same as for the space suits. The space suits had to made to dump extra heat because the astronauts' bodies generated more than was absorbed from the environment. Cameras had reflective bodies and internal insulation, especially around the film magazines.

If you consult the online documentation, you would find that there were film safes for unexposed and exposed film storage and requirements for the amount of time that film could remain in the cameras. Remember that surface time was only a few hours. The rest of the time the film was in the command module.

From Yahoo Answers:

The temperture usually given for the Moon is the SURFACE temperature. In a vacuum there is no ambient, therefore the surface temperature is irrelevant to the camera. In the vacuum of space the major source of heat is radiant solar heat, and you can protect against this by making the outer surface reflective. Check the cameras on Apollo. They did indeed have reflective outer casings.

The temperatures on the moon were quite moderate because all Apollo missions were scheduled to be on the Moon at the “lunar morning”. The surface was already pre-heated for some days but not as hot as it would be at the lunar moon or afternoon a week later.