This paper explores the historical role of film and photography within the U.S. nuclear testing program, focusing on its crucial (but little known) role in the production of new visions of the planet. The U.S. nuclear project relied heavy on scientific photography to understand the nature of nuclear effects but it also built itself by creating documentary films (mostly classified and subject to compartmentalized viewing) for specific audiences -- military, scientific, political, and civilian. This paper theorizes "exposure" within the test program as the basis for knowledge (across the earth, material, and biological sciences) but also tracks how the global effects and geopolitics of the atomic bomb created a vital new concept of the planetary.