The history of horse racing on film has given an innovational idea to telecast the horse show all over the world. The telecast has become one of the common source of entertainment among the people all over the world.
Now, let’s begin with the history of horse racing on film.
Eadweard Muybridge a photographer uses high technology stop motion photography to capture a horse’s motion. Former California Governor Leland Stanford funded Muybridge’s film enquiry. They were an odd pair. Stanford was an regal, headstrong captain of industry who had helped build the external railroad and later on found the university that bears his son’s name. Born Edward Muggeridge (Muybridge) was a flamboyant and successful landscape camera man who had shot and murdered his wife’s lover and was absolve on the grounds of justifiable homicide.
Stanford at the beginning staked Muybridge $2,000 for the project, but over the next six years he had done the project costing $50,000 twice the diffident wager and about $1.1 million in today’s currency.
Many cameraman were still using exposures of 15 seconds to one minute. Automatic screen were in their infancy: expensive and unreliable. All you had to do was to disconnect the lens cap or even cover the lens with a large black cloth or a hat. The glass plates had a speed equal to about ISO 1.
Muybridge formulated more-sensitive emulsions and worked on comprehensive shutter devices. He also furnished a trip wire across a racetrack, letting the horse’s chest depressed against the wire to engage an electric circuit that unlock a slat-shaped shutter mechanism to make the divestment.
This system generates an “automatic electro-photograph” on July 1, 1877. It showed Occident, a Stanford racehorse, apparently with all four feet off the ground. The public and the press failed to accept this as proof, still, because of what they saw was of course retouched. No wonder: The film had been re build by painting it, then photographing the film, then making a woodcut of the film.
Inside the shack, behind a row of 12 shield, was a row of 12 cameras. As a backup, each camera had two lenses and made two separate divestment. If both came out, Muybridge selected the sharpest photo.
So, on June 15, 1878, before compiling gentlemen of the press, Stanford’s top instructor drove Stanford’s top trotter across the round trip wires at about 40 feet per second, setting off all 12 cameras in rapid serial in less than half a second.
About 20 minutes later, Muybridge display the freshly developed photogenic plates. The horse, actually, lifted all four legs off the ground while its stride. Muybridge also accepted the zoetrope, a popular children’s toy that produced the misunderstanding of motion by spinning a sequel of animation-style drawings behind a viewing cut. He fitted one with a glass disk to proposal the trotting serial onto a screen. (Because the system comprises of the pictures, an artist had to redraw Muybridge’s photographic photo to counteract the distortion.)
Nonetheless, the “zoopraxiscope” designed the first photographic motion film, and it was a hit with Stanford. Muybridge went on to publish a sequel of finely printed, large-format books of his stop-motion films. Soon, Lumière brothers and the Thomas Edison took Muybridge’s proof of concept and gave birth to new movies as a industrial art form.
This was the history of horse racing on film and the way in which the industry was inspired to use the camera.
