EX: Calculate the speed of this horse from Muybridge's photos
The photos look like a film strip: A silhouetted horse gallops across eleven frames before coming to a standstill in the twelfth. Numbers run across the top of each image, while vertical lines are visible in the background. Three of the frames show the horse’s hooves leaving the ground completely. The horse is 16 and 1/4 hands tall, Fletcher Jones Scholar in Computation and Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies Douglas Goodwin tells his students, the vertical lines are 27 inches apart, and each image was snapped with a shutter speed of 1/25 of a second. So, how fast was the horse running and how far apart were the cameras when these images were taken?
The students head into Zoom breakout rooms to discuss these questions. With the information that Goodwin’s provided—and some quick research to convert a “hand” into a more familiar unit of measurement—they determine that the horse was running at the approximate speed of a mile every minute-and-a-half (~40mph, a fast "sprint gallop"), and that the cameras, like the vertical lines in the frame, were spaced at 27-inch intervals in order to capture the horse in different stages of motion.
Cameras and tripwires at Stanford's Farm
Quotes from "For Computational Photography Students, Rooms Become Cameras—and Zoom Becomes a Subject"
Scripps College News Arts and Culture