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eadweard muybridge (dict)
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Eadweard MuybridgeEadweard Muybridge (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904) was a British-born photographer, known primarily for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion. Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge at Kingston-on-Thames, England. He changed his name because he believed it was the Anglo-Saxon original of his given name. Eadward began his career as an assistant to landscape photographer Carleton E. Watkins. Eadweard started his career in 1867 with photos of Yosemite and San Francisco. Many of his Yosemite photographs reproduced the same scenes taken by Watkins. Muybridge quickly became famous for his landscape photographs, which showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the West. He published his photographs under the pseudonym Helios. In 1872, businessman and former California governor Leland Stanford hired Muybridge to settle a question (not a bet, as is popularly believed): Stanford claimed, contrary to popular belief, that there was a point in a horse's gallop when all four hooves were off the ground. By 1878, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using a series of fifty cameras. Each of the cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse's, and each of the camera shutters were controlled by trip wires which were triggered by the horse's hooves. This series of photos, taken at what is now Stanford University, is called The Horse in Motion, and shows that, indeed, the hooves all leave the ground. In 1874, Muybridge was tried for murdering his wifes lover, but was acquitted as justifiable homicide. Muybridge thought his son was fathered by someone else and put in an orphanage. When his son grew up, he had a remarkable resemblance to Muybridge. After Muybridges acquittal, he left the U.S., photographed in Central America, and returned in 1877 Later, he conducted research in order to improve the chemistry of his development methods to better capture motion in his photography. Muybridge noticed how much public attention those pictures drew and invented the Zoopraxiscope, a machine similar to the Zoetrope, but that projected the images so the public could see realistic motion. The system was in a way, a precursor to the development of the motion picture. Eadweard Muybridge returned to his native England in 1894 and he died 1904 in Kingston-on-the-Thames. Muybridge used this technique many times to photograph people and animals to study their movement. The people were often photographed in little or no clothing in a variety of undertakings. From boxing,to walking down stairs, and even small children walking to their mother were sufficiently interesting to Muybridge to be the subject of his photographs. His work stands near the beginning of the science of biomechanics and the mechanics of athletics. In the summer of 2004, during the Summer Olympic games which were held in Greece, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts housed an exhibition highlighting ancient Greece and included 2 of Muybridge's photograph plates hanging next to more modern representations of athletes as part of the exhibit. In the 1990s, U2 made a video to their song Lemon into a tribute to Muybridge's techniques. In 2004, the electronic music group 'The Crystal Method' made a music video, which garnered much praise, to their song Born Too Slow which down to the nearly ever-present background grid, was entirely based on Muybridge's work. Similar setups of carefully timed multiple cameras are used in modern special effects photography with the opposite goal: capturing changing camera angles with little or no movement of the subject. Influenced: - tienne-Jules Marey - recorded first series of live action with a single camera
- Thomas Edison - owns patent for motion picture camera
- William Dickson - credited as inventor of motion picture camera
External links Muybridge, Eadweard Muybridge, Eadweard Muybridge, Eadweard Muybridge, Eadweard
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