Old photos- Why do cars look like they are leaning forward at speed?

Wow - very cool and interesting... Thanks for sharing all the info, guys!

Malcolm

 

Here is Ralph De palma at 150MPH in 1920 at Daytona Beach with his Packard LSR car.

 

This is one of my favorite early racing images. The photo was shot in 1913 by Jacques-Henri Lartigue.



50Fraud, great photo. I would have taken it for a vintage photo. Isn't that the Barlow Simca?

Cheers,
Kurt O.

 

So knowing shutter speed, then the top part of car pictures
movement from bottom of wheel = how fast it is going?

 

I think you need one more piece of information, namely the distance between the two blades (width of the "slit" of the shutter)....so it probably is impossible to calculate the car's speed from just looking at the picture, unless you know more about the particular camera.

 

I have always wondered about that too. I think that you can also replicate it with big 4x5 and 8x10 cameras. As I recall some shots that we published a while back had that effect. That Lartigue image is cool. He had some brillient shots. I'll try to find the images from that shot and post.

Best, MRAK

Interesting point that squirrel and LB+1 bring up, is this why it doesn't happen when the pics are shot at a distance?

 

A 4X5, 5X7, 8X10 view camera will not be able to give you the "speed" effect. They have a standard iris, not a focal plane shutter.
We used a cirkut camera doing panorama photography for many years that did have a focal plane shutter, but then switched to 8X10 cameras in the 70's to avoid the problems and distortion caused by the focal plane shutter cirkut cameras. Also, the cirkut film was expense as each negative was 8"X36".
The problems that we avoided are, of course, the same quirks that gave old speeding car photos their "charm".

 

Neat stuff here!
I guess if you flipped the camera the "wrong way" up for the direction of travel you could have that elipse leaning back instead of leaning forward!

That's what I think is called the stroboscopic effect.
It's a "flaw" in motion picture picture frame to frame photography where the consecutive frames image different spokes in a wheel as the wheel turns and "stops" them but depending on the wheel RPM and the number of spokes, it can make the wheel's spokes appear to be stopped or even backing up.

It also tells you you are watching film and not video tape, (unless the video tape "frames" as it shoots).

 

Thanks, Kurt. Yes, it's one of three Barlow Simca Specials, running at a VARA event at OCIR in the mid-'70s. I shot a picture of each entrant using this technique, and gave the matted polaroid prints to the drivers instead of a dash plaque.

In your Lartique photo, he was panning (hence the leaning background), but the car was moving faster than his pan. Great picture!

 

And the Film was alot slower also.

 

Great question,answers,thread. This place is kool. Thanks,Smokey

 

bRilliant Thought!

 

Like about 20 ASA or slower.

 

We used ASA 16 in the cirkut panarama cameras. Mine was made by Eastman in 1917. All photos are a blend of selecting the right shutterspeed to the right F-stop. Thats one reason why there is always a blurred flag in so many old photos. The photographer had to give up a quicker shutter speed to get a higher F-stop to have a better depth of field, due to slow ASA film.
This speed effect is caused by the shutter moving from one side to other. It is a mechanical funtion that is the cause of the cars/wheels appearing to be leaping forward.

 

For the most part you are all correct. It also had to do with the speed of film,
the shutter speed and the proximity of the subject to the lens.

Most of these old cameras had a fixed lens and were usually on the wide side.
The closer the subject is to the lens the more it's going to "bow", meaning it'll
look bigger the closer it is to the lens.

When you consider the race cars were traveling at speed, the shutter speed had to be approximated, compounded by the speed of the film, it's pretty
amazing these guys even got images at all.

I had the opportnity once to pull some prints off some of Matthew Brady's original glass plates. Other than the aberrations from the camera, the images were amazingly sharp (when everything had aligned properly)

 

Why does Squirrel always have the right answer?

 

The speed of the film (ASA), the shutter speed and the f-Stop are all the three variables in producing a photo. A photographer must choose the right combination of the three for the effect that he desires and final result of the subject.
Film speed doesn't have anything to do with this threads subject. If it did, the a very slow speed film used in any camera would bring about this odd effect.
Its all mechanical, folks.
I will add that the slow speed film of yesteryear did require the photographer to have to decide if he wanted to use a slow shutter speed with a high F-Stop or a quicker shutter speed and a mid-range F-Stop, (such as a 11 or 5,6, etc.), and run the risk of having such a small depth of field that the subject would become "soft" if not out of focus.

 

Exactly. Almost all of the films back then were of a "slow" speed.






"You're best friends will stab you in the front." -Oscar Wilde

 

Thanks all. I love this type of thread...

 

cause he is Squirrel!

• If you spell Squirrel in Scrabble, you win. Forever.
• Squirrel can win at solitaire with only 18 cards.
• The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Even the worst-laid plans of Squirrel come off without a hitch.
• 70% of a human's weight is water. 70% of Squirrel's weight is his brain
• Squirrel calculated the last digit of pi.
• Squirrel can get Blackjack with just one card.
• Squirrel has actually cooked minute rice in 30 seconds.
• When Squirrel plays Monopoly, it affects the actual world economy.

 

So... does a cheap disposable camera use a focal plane shutter?

 

My 6th grade teacher did that, on the Washington DC field trip!

 

The guy that pioneered that Panoramic camera was E.O. Goldbeck from San Antonio..my sister-in-law worked for him and has one of his old cameras..she has some really cool photos, one of them is a picture of the Austin chapter Banditos from the 80s, my little niece Katie is in the picture....

 

Goldbeck might have used a cirkut panorama camera, but he didn't invent it.
Unless, of course, he did so when he was 13 years old.
He was born in 1891. The cirkut camera went into production in 1904.

 

Funny you should mention... at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum (where the Marmon Wasp is, of course) on the east wall there are some large panoramic photos of the starting field of some early 500s. If you look closely you can see the photographer has worked himself into both ends of the photos.

 

Hi all - really interesting discussion. Can I drop a fly in the ointment here and suggest that for most of these pictures (in particular the one with the people who appear to be leaning backwards in the background) there is another factor causing the effect…

True the background and the car body can only be tilted because of the shutter effects described in posts above, however the wheels have an added complication.

Let's assume the car is travelling at 100mph. The bottom of the wheel (the part touching the road) is travelling at... 0mph, the axle is travelling at 100mph and the top of the wheel is travelling at 200mph! So even with a modern camera, you will get some ellipsoid effect on the tyres, since for the period of time the shutter is open, the bottom of the wheel is effectively stationary while the centre of the wheel moves at the same speed as the car and the top of the wheel moves forward at twice the speed of the car.
Cheers - Robert

 

That's true and I got the same phenomena with my Iphone 1st generation as I took some pictures from a train. Didn't think it would happen on a digital cameraphone. Weird stuff

 

That's true, if you're talking about the speed of the wheel relative to the ground. However, the actual position of each part of the wheel, relative to the car, isn't changing.

 

Squirrel is, indeed, the most interesting man on the HAMB!

 

ok- now you get to explain why the the wheels and propellers appear to turn backwards in some movie shots![hint-think frames per second]