Have you seen today’s Google Doodle (the picture on the front page of Google featuring their name)?
It features Eadweard J. Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion. If you click the picture on Google you can see the horse running. Below is how the actual set of pictures looked that make up the moving image:
Eadweard J. Muybridge was an English photographer who used multiple cameras to take pictures of animals and people in motion, and then project them as moving pictures before film with a zoopraxiscope. His work helped to better understand how people and animals move.
The Horse in Motion was created to settle a common question of the day scientifically: were all four of a horses hooves on or off the ground while at a trot? Art leading up to this point in history often featured the horse at a trot with all legs off the ground, the front legs out in front off the ground and the back legs out behind the horse and off the ground. He set up a series of cameras to take pictures as the horse trotted past. It took only a single picture to actually solve the debate: a horse does have all four hooves off the ground at once, when all legs are tucked up under the animal while switching between pulling forward with the front legs and pushing forward with the back legs, not as artists had depicted.
Here are a couple more examples of movement photography by Muybridge:
Horse Jumping
Buffalo Running
(Animal Locomotion, Plate 700, 1887)
Ostrich
(found here)
