Photographer - Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge started professional photography from sometime between 1861 and 1866 after he had recovered from a serious accident where he was bodily ejected out of a stagecoach and hit his head. Muybridge then made his way back to the states in 1867 where he became successful with his new talent due to his highly proficient technical skills and an artist's eye. His main focuses where on landscape and architectural photography. Muybridge had even converted a lightweight carriage into his own portable darkroom to be able to carry out his work more efficiently. Muybridge established his reputation with photos of the Yosemite Valley wilderness and areas around San Francisco.

In 1872 Leland Stanford (The former governor of California and race-horse owner) hired Muybridge for some photographic studies on horses. The studies was to find out if all four hooves of a horse were of the ground while trotting. Muybridge began experimenting with 12 cameras set up in an array along a track where the horse was going to trot along. His initial efforts seemed to prove Stanford correct that all four hooves were off the ground at a given time, but his process wasn't perfected so Stanford set Muybridge on the question  to make it clearer. Between 1878 and 1884 Muybridge had perfected his method of a horses motion of trotting and galloping, to where he had proven that a horse does in fact have all four hooves off the ground at a stage in its gallop. He had proven it with a single negative showing Stanford's very own standardbred horse named Occident airborne during a trot. That very negative was lost but the images survived through a printing technique called woodcuts which were made at the time. Later Muybridge did additional studies as well as improving the shutter speed of his camera and fast film emulsions. By the time of 1878 Stanford had spurred on the expansion of the experiments to the point where Muybridge had successfully photographed a horses trot. The lantern slide of his later work had survived and have been used to replicate his work into images that we have now like GIFs. Muybridge later went on to photograph things from how bison run and how horses jump over objects to how boys played leapfrog and the way they jump over one another.