Clear Pictures from a Distance How are astronauts able to take high resolution photos of small objects on the Earth's surface while traveling at 25,000 feet per second without the image being blurred?
 A: For a long exposure, they move the camera to componensate for the ISS motion. 
From Time Magazine  on  taking sharp images of Earth.
DP is Don Pettit, who has spent 370 days in space.

DP: Okay. I'm an amateur astronomer, and amateur astronomers make this thing they call a barn door tracker. You take a couple hinges and two pieces of plywood and a bolt, and you hinge the two pieces of plywood on one side. You have the bolt going through so you can turn the bolt and change the angle between the hinges. And then you mount a camera on it, and if you orient this so the hinge line is pointing towards Polaris, by turning the bolt you will actually hinge the piece of plywood so it moves with Earth's rotation. Then if you know what the thread pitch is on your bolt, and the little geometry of this, you might know that if I turn the bolt a half a revolution every 15 seconds that [it] will keep up with the Earth's motion.
Now you put a camera on there. This is not for telescopes -- this would be for wide field astro photography, where maybe you have an 80 millimeter lens on a 35 millimeter camera. You open the shutter and turn your little bolt a half a revolution every 15 seconds and that, you know, over the course of a 3- or 4-minute exposure, will basically compensate for Earth's motion. And when you close the shutter you'll have a picture where stars will be nice pinpoints. So that's a barn door tracker. It's a real simple, inexpensive thing that any amateur astronomer can make and take really good wide field astro photographs.
To take pictures at night of Earth took a 1-second, maybe 1 1/2-second exposure. Orbital motion is so fast that if you just lock the camera on station and take a 1-second exposure it would be blurry. This barn door tracker allowed you to precisely track and compensate for orbital motion and make a 1-second-ish exposure, so you could record things like cities at night with up to 60-meter resolution.

