Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge, original name Edward James Muggeridge (born April 9, 1830, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, Eng.—died May 8, 1904, Kingston upon Thames), English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection.He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He immigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous.Muybridge’s experiments in photographing motion began in 1872, when the railroad magnate Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of ²/₁₀₀₀ of a second. These lectures were illustrated with a zoopraxiscope, a lantern he developed that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving pictures. The zoopraxiscope display, an important predecessor of the modern cinema, was a sensation at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. 

The picture above is the one he did with the horse.

Muybridge made his most important photographic studies of motion from 1884 to 1887 under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. Many of these photographs were published in 1887 in the portfolio Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. Muybridge continued to publicize and publish his work until 1900, when he retired to his birthplace.

His work is the reason animators have such a good understanding of human and all kinds of different movement, his work allowed us to make smooth and continuous animations like Gertie the dinosaur.

Reference link:Eadweard Muybridge - Wikipedia