Every day we share a single photo from our Flickr Pool shot by one of our faithful and talented readers (that’s you!)
Whoa - I just had a flashback to Art History class again. It was in direct response to a photograph in the pool by Robert Fougere, and it reminded me of the work of Eadweard Muybridge. In the 1870's, California Governor Leland Stanford commissioned Muybridge, and English landscape photographer living in the US, to use this new-fangled photography thing to answer an age-old question: when a horse is in full gallop, is there any point in time when all four hooves are off the ground at the same time? Muybridge used a series of cameras in a line, all set up to have the shutters triggered as the horse passed by. It took a few years to perfect the process, and Stanford had his question answered - there was indeed a moment when all four hooves left the ground. Muybridge went on to devote the rest of his life to studying human and animal locomotion using the techniques he developed, and inadvertently created the predecessor to moving pictures in the process.
Fast forward 140-or so years, and Robert has taken a similar principle but turned it inside out and compressed it into one single frame - 15 flashes from a strobe revealing the range of motion during a golf swing. We may never know how far the ball was driven, or if the current Governor of California was involved in any way.
