The pictures of the horse galloping was done in 1878.
Yes, I think one large off-camera flash would do it. I don’t know what the technology of the times were, but how hard would it be to set up a mechanism which simultaneously opened the shutter for a short period (say 1/30 of a second). and set off the magnesium flash?
That’s a good point. Muybridge was able to get shutter speeds up to 1/2000 of a second from what I could find. I don’t get the sense his shutter was by any means widespread by the early 1900s. It sounds almost like a one-off to me, but I don’t know for certain.
That’s not really a problem. If you’re using slow film (say 25 ISO), a moderate-to-high aperture (f/11, f/16), and are in a fairly dim warehouse type lighting situation, you’re looking at shutter speeds probably in the 15 - 30 second range to get a full ambient exposure.
The problem is I’ve been trying to look up the duration of those flash powders, and they don’t seem to be much faster than the shutters at the time. I’m finding anything from as slow as 1/7 second to 1/100 second.
If you read carefully, you’ll see that the only person who doubted the date after samclem’s post is Aspidistra, who could easily have still been composing the post while samclem was posting the verification of the date.
Other posts subsequent to that have only questioned whether it would be possible to take a live action shot of this quality at that date - they’re not questioning the date, but whether it was staged/posed or is a live action snapshot.
That’s interesting, but it just explains the fast frame rate, not the shutter speed.
From the angle they are riding at, and the small circumference of the track, the are most certainly riding very slowly and supporting themselves mostly with tire friction, not balanced by centripetal force.
I’d think you could get such a position with very slow, near stand-still balancing, and not incur motion blur.
Neat picture 
You dont NEED fast flash powders.
The fact that the flash powder is slower than the shutter speed you want just means you have wasted some flash powder. So just use MORE flash powder.
If you were willing to burn a buttload of flashpowder all at once AND had a decently fast shutter, I don’t doubt you could take a picture like this. You might litterally burn a working man’s week or months worth of wages for one shot, but its doable IMO.
Old and staged.
Quite a bright flash, as would be needed.
I see no reason to believe the photo was faked. As GargoyleWB said, they are not likely riding very fast. This is not a race, it looks like some kind of performance. There is a very bright light just out of frame to the right. It could be a bright flash or daylight.
This was the turn of the century, not the stone age.
No, they are not riding at all. Their upright position means that the pedal on the high side would hit the track when it is in the 6 o’clock position.
Mountain bikers who ride slickrock figure this out on their first ride. You can’t pedal traversing a steep slope.
Good observation, I agree, flare is visible (or it could reflection from dust). And the shadows are consistent with that light, but also note the shadows of the wood slats on the floor of the velodrome. You can clearly see that there were three point-sources of light, two from the right and one from the left. I don’t know anything about what technology was available at that time, though.
…except for the fact that the two pictures do seem to show the riders in the exact same position. Maybe this is a museum display or some such thing?
You’re either not understanding this or you’ve completely missed the point I was making.
Either your flash powder or your shutter speed is going to need to be at least 1/250 second if these folks are going around the track at normal bike riding speeds. You don’t need a fast shutter. You don’t need a short flash duration. But you do need ONE of these two. Technology of the time seems to have a limit on both of these of 1/100 second, except for some technical cameras that were out there.
Isn’t that exactly what I said?
What do you think my words “decently fast shutter” means?
Did your typical camera back then have a decently fast shutter? Maybe not.
Could I rig one up for a special shot in a fixed location, with tripod, bulky equipment, cooperating subjects with the technology of the day…pretty sure I could.
And without any detailed analysis of the photo your 1/100 of a second shutter speed just wouldnt cut it, but 1/250 would be fine and dandy observation doesnt make much sense either.
And you are assuming these guys were zipping around that ring when its possible they were barely rolling or perhaps not at all for that matter as others have pointed out.
OK let’s think about this quantitatively. Would you agree that even the fastest of these riders look sharp, with no more than 1/4 inch of motion blur?
So, if the shutter speed was 1/100, it means they were riding at less than 25 inches per second, or 1.4 mph. I’m fairly sure that speed is too low to maintain the angle of the riders shown in the photo. It also seems unlikely that they can ride that slowly and still stay on the highly banked surface.
I’ve got some observations, in decreasing order of importance:
A big reason to think it’s not live-action, is that in the none of the riders have their handlebars turned. I’ve never tried it, but I don’t think you could ride on a curved wall like that without steering around the curve. And definitely the rider in the right front couldn’t avoid running into the wall; there’s no way he’s balancing on a track stand either with his front wheel straight.
Plus, the supports for that wall look really flimsy to support the stresses of four (or just three?) guys standing on it, let alone riding around it.
Thirdly, the shadows show there are at least three light sources. The shadow of the rightmost rider is about 45 degrees in front of him and to his left (pointing the same direction as some barely visible shadows from the wall at the far rightmost edge of the inside), but there are very distinct shadows from the slats of the wall directly below him that point almost into the camera, about sixty degrees away from the rider’s shadow. And the floor in the center has a pattern of shadows evidently caused by a light near the floor to the left of the track (a light that is masked by something off camera to the left, so there’s a brightly lit section of floor to the left, then a darker section, where there are shadows of the track from the light source to the far right). This doesn’t mean a whole lot, but makes it unlikely this is a flash picture.
And finally, the bike on the left front looks to me like it has a very loose chain (looser than I would expect for something as high-performance as circus tricks), but I could easily be wrong about that.
I know nothing about vaudeville-era acts, but is it possible this is some kind of illusion/magic act?
Are we sure this is a photo? It kind of looks like a very high-quality pencil drawing to me, possibly made from a real photo but sharpened up.
Assuming it IS a photo, the three guys who are on the sloped wall already are moving slowly. I figure that in this act, the guys would start on the flat middle part and go up on the slope one-at-a-time. This was caught as three of them had done so, and the fourth was just about to. At this time, you’d expect them to be going at a minimum speed which would correspond to how slow they could go without their uphill-side pedals hitting. After all four guys were on the track, they’d speed it up.
One other point - the shadows are wrong. Look at the shadow of the guy on the back curtain, and then in the lower left of the photo at the shadow of the velodrome itself. There is a sharp line there between dark and light, but I don’t see anything that would cast that shadow. It starts from the center of the velodrome for some reason.
Given that, I’m going out on a limb with my guess that this is a drawing made from a photo.
I was thinking about that - and maybe the answer is just that these performers were quite skilled at spacing and positioning themselves consistently - considering the nature of their show, it’s pretty much a requirement.