Sports photography question

[MooseDog]

Originally Posted by billyb

Moose,
Thanks Moose, but I know I have seen a 4 sequence photo from the 20s or 30s. It was of Babe Ruth and his swing. Was wondering if around that time was the earliest, or was it done even before the 1920s?

It's been about 30 years since I was really into photography, but if I can shake off some of the dust in my brain...

I don't think the technology to take four rapid pictures from one camera existed in the 1920s. Basically the cameras took one negative at a time. You had to physically pull out a frame holding a glass plate negative, then pull up the cover of the holder, take the picture, put the cover back in, take the plate out, put in another, lather, rinse, repead. There were dual backed negative holders, still the time to change or flip would be at minimum 30 seconds to a minute each.

More likely the images was made up of four different swings and then printed from from four negatives to one piece of photographic paper. You could do this by cutting a matte, and then printing each individual photo in each "square".

Another scenario would be having four different cameras set up and tripped in sequence. There were no auto-timers back then so each would have to have been manually tripped by one or more people.

The farthest out theory - I vaguely remember a book of pictures of unsual cameras. I think I recall seeing a view camera with multiple lenses - four mounted on one board but this could just be a mind shadow. Would have been very expensive at the time but New York is probably where one would find such a beast.