5.2 Freeze Frames-Stopping Time
An example of Muybridge's fast-motion photography
For most people, the arc of their golf swing or tennis stroke is an abstract image, something that happens much too fast for the unaided eye to see. Fortunately, modern athletes have a special tool available StroMotion with which to obtain and study an actual, visible record of their movements. But StroMotion is not a brand new concept in fact it's an old idea newly linked to digital video and computer software. StroMotion uses processes and technology developed by photographic pioneers such as Eadweard Muybridge, who conducted the first photographic sequential motion studies, and Harold Edgerton, inventor of the strobe light, which seems to stop even the speediest objects like bullets in transit.
In 1872, Leland Stanford the soon-to-be Governor of California who was also a businessman, horse lover, racetrack owner, and
later founder of Stanford University encountered this commonly debated question of the time: whether during a horse's gallop all four hooves were ever off the ground at the same time. This was called "unsupported transit," and Stanford took it upon himself to settle this popular debate scientifically. He hired a well-known British photographer named Eadweard Muybridge, then working in San Francisco, to get the answer.
By 1878, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using a series of fifty cameras. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse's, and each of the camera shutters was triggered by electronic timers developed specifically for the project. The resulting series of photos proved that the hooves do all leave the ground at the same time although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as artists of the day had imagined.
Muybridge continued to use this technique to photograph human beings and animals in order to "freeze" and study their motion. He made sequential motion studies of athletes in a wide variety of sports and additional studies of everyday people performing mundane movements like walking down stairs. Muybridge's work helped inaugurate the modern science of biomechanics, the research and analysis of the mechanics of living organisms.
Furthermore, when a viewer flips rapidly through a sequence of Muybridge's pictures, it appears to the eye that the original motion has been restored. Viewers appreciated these images for reasons of both science and entertainment, and inventors like Thomas Edison were inspired to work harder on the creation of a motion picture process. Hence Muybridge is considered to have been a crucial figure in the development of movies.
Muybridge showed that the value of a sequence of photographs could be greater than that of any single image, a lesson that was later
applied in photojournalism as well as biomechanics. But after Muybridge, inventors persisted in seeking ways to photograph faster and faster motion, and eventually they came back to the stroboscope