while it is possible that an action photo could have been taken with an open shutter in a dark room with a flash duration, i don’t think so in this case. the guys would have to be riding in the dark, that might have been possible that they were riding and the lights turned out but i would only think that could happen with all at full speed, one rider is not yet up.
Hey, if you can’t ride in the dark, you shouldn’t be in the circus.
I think they are either not moving at all, or moving extremely slowly.
If you checkout **Cardinal_fang’**s link to the posters, the angles of the riders who are obviously supposed to be going fast, they are leaning over far more than these are.
They will be riding fixed wheel machines, and so it is highly possible to stand still, or ride very slowly, I have done it plenty of times myself.
As for artificial light sources, seems we have forgotten just how bright limelights were, and gas lanterns were plenty powerful enough, especially if you have lots of them.
As far as motion blur goes, this picture of cyclists going quite quickly around a banked track in 1908 might be worth looking at. Especially the guy on top. It’s not as crisp as the photo in the OP, but you can still see every spoke clearly.
They were filming a 1901 version of The Matrix.
I don’t have the editing facilities where I am right now, but has anyone used a photo editor to enlarge areas around the spokes and tires? I’m thinking of evidence of motion blur, even just a little bit.
This is my thought also. Sort of a sinewave motion, when at the peak height on the track, they could pause essentially motionless before coming back down.
interesting thought though that would be making a lot of impacts on the track, it doesn’t look that strong and in doesn’t seem to be weighted or fastened to withstand that.
Sure, they’re bright, but they’re still not even close to sunlight. Most people don’t appreciate just how bright actual daylight is.
That scenario was based on the bicycles being mounted where we see them and the riders just posing there.
My observations:
The 3 pictures have the same bike positions but completely different lighting; separate flashes for each exposure? Actually more likely multiple source stage lighting - you can see the rounded spotlight patterns…
The spotlight on the right seems to have gone out before the last pic was taken, leaving the right side under the track in the dark.
The only guy that seems to have moved is the center guy. Everyone else is “holding the pose” including bike positions and pedal positions and head turned. The bikes must be braced or wired.
Looking closely at the hi-res wiki picture, it appears there is some sort of brace on the back of the rear wheel of the left-most cyclist, unless he has an extra-long mudflap.
My guess - as debated above, the cameras of the day were not up to the task of photographing a fast vaudeville act like this live, so they braced the bikes up to fake their publicity photos with available stage light (reasonably bright). Nothing that we wouldn’t expect - “hold that pose, pretend you’re swinging the bat” sort of stuff.
In those days, a heavily leaning realistic pose would probably look “fake” to the naiive public, so they went for the more sedate upright poses?
If you’re photographing a static scene, there’s no compelling reason to use a flash or even particularly bright lights, or a fast shutter.
That just looks like shadows on the (light coloured) tyre to me.
It’s possible the spokes were drawn in. They did all sorts of manipulations to photos back then.
But then, there are different values of “static”. If those are wax mannequins, then sure, take a half-hour for your shot if you need to. But if they’re humans sitting on wire-mounted bikes, you can get away with a lot longer exposure than with moving bikes, but there’s still a limit to how long people can sit perfectly still.
I imported the photo to an editor. Upon enlarging, I was unable to see any motion blur; however, the JPG artifacts and pixelation exceed the resolution that would be necessary to determine blur for sure if it was present.
Still, within the display limits, I don’t think there is any motion blur. This means that either the shutter or flash was fast for moving actors, or they were not moving. Doesn’t narrow it down, much, I know.
Ive found references to shots of 1/1000 in early 1900’s so agree the bicycle spokes issue may be less of an issue than claimed although the light sources would still have to be pretty phenomenal given its indoors and are unlikely to be flashes. Google camera shutter speed history if you want to find the references.
The 3 different shots of a near identical indoors scene still make me think a tableau of some sort is the most likely explanation though.
If you look carefully at the front tire on the right rear bike there seems to be a brace around the bottom of it.
the front left bike you cant see the tires, but there is a suspicious piece of metal attached to the hoop brace where it would need to be attached
We seem to be talking around in circles.
If they’re moving, the flash and/or shutter must have been fast and the illumination level quite bright.
If they’re not moving, the shutter could have been comparatively slow and the illumination quite ordinary.
In neither of these cases is it necessary to start with a darkened room.
Some of you guys just don’t get the flash thing.
Lets take something modern like a Vivitar 283/285 electronic flash. About the same size/volume of a “walky talky” you might see a firefighter/police officer using a few decades ago. Runs off of 4 AA batteries and a standard for non studio level setup indoor flash photography.
Now, lets go back a few more decades. Remember those movies circa WWII and a few decades after that? The ones where press photographers took pictures of starletts getting out of limos and they used flashbulbs to get the shot? Those flashbulbs were the size of small eggs and probably contained something like a gram of flammable material. Compress that material and it would about the size of a sugar cube, and maybe a good bit smaller.
Those two “flashes” put out a similiar amount of light. If anything, the chemical flash bulbs probably put out more total light than the Vivitar 283/285. At the very least, they are certainly in the same range.
The biggest difference is those flash bulbs took something like 1/30 of second give or take to put out all that energy. The electronic flashes could do it signifcantly faster.
However, lets say I want to take a camera shot that takes A BUNCH OF LIGHT. Because, maybe its 1900, the film is very slow and I have a very fast for the day shutter I have rigged up.
Well, its easy peasy to get a bunch of light. I set off a 1000 of those flashbulbs at the same time. Well, I don’t have those exact bulbs. But I do have flashpowder. A thousand flashbulbs worth of flash powder would weigh something like a kilogram (two pounds give or take).
Now, that flashpowder is going to take more like a 1/10 of a second to go off if I set it up right, but you are still going to have plenty of light to work with.
Or, in other words, even way back then, if you were willing to spend some significant money (on a per shot basis) on flash powder for a special photo shot, you could get plenty of light. All modern electronic technology has done is made that light cheap, easy, and hassle free.