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mounted high in the air on top of the grandstand, it is positioned with mathematical accuracy squarely on the finish line. The camera position is actually determined by surveyors, who align aperture and finish line with as great precision as might be taken in surveying the boundaries of one of those Park Avenue lots where a difference of a fraction of an inch might make a six-figure difference in price.
In the Photo-Chart camera t h e aperture through which the picture is made is an almost microscopically narrow slit, eight thousandths of an inch wide. A telephoto lens of the proper focal length (a 5^> inch Cooke /: 2 lens is being used at Hollywood Park) images the full width of the track on the film, which is directly behind the slit. The film moves past the aperture at a speed directly proportioned to the speed of the horses; it averages an inch and a quarter per second. In effect, this gives to each 0.008" section of the film an exposure of 1 /35th of a second.
At this point anyone who has ever tried to “stop" the movement of a race-horse with a camera will rise to point out that you can't possibly “stop" the movement of a horse galloping at thirty-five or forty miles an hour with so slow an exposure. But some of the older hands at photography may remember how, long ago, back in the days before lenses or films were as fast as they are now, the news
hawks learned that they could get by with slower shutter-speeds if in making such shots they panned the camera to follow the moving object. In other words, like the Akeley-camera picture, the movement of the camera with the horse keeps the image of the horse’s body virtually motionless on the film, and naturally a slower shutter-speed will stop the movement effectively.
The same general thing happens as the film in the Photo-Chart camera moves past the slit. Film and image move approximately the same speed, in the same direction. Therefore the image is apparently motionless with respect to the film.
Actually, this works out so that as the tip of the leading nag’s nose reaches the finish-line the moving film records its image. As the next section of the horse’s head crosses the line, a fresh minute width of film is there to picture it — and so on until the last wisp of the horse’s tail whisks across the line. And we have a picture of every section of that horse at exactly the instant it crossed the line! By keeping the camera going, we can make similar pictures of each of the other runners, in precisely the order in which each finished.
This gives us a negative bearing a latent image of the finish — accurate enough, but quite useless until it lias been developed, fixed and, if the picture is to be of any value to the layman, printed as a positive, preferably an enlarged one.
So after the film leaves the camera section of Del Riccio's apparatus, it travels immediately through a small developing tank. In this tank is a developer which must be something like liquid dynamite, for it develops
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