Synchroballisitic images of skateboarding taken in London in 2002 - 2003. The images were made by adapting an analog camera into a "Slit Scan” camera, where the film moves continually through the camera past a narrow slit during the exposure at a speed calculated to synchronise with the speed of the moving subject. The technique has been around for over a century, typically used at race meetings to record the competitors at the finish line, a "photofinish”, or to record speeding objects in such applications as missile telemetry, known as “synchroballistic”. The success of the process is to synchronise the speed of the film moving through the camera to the speed of the subject. In effect the resulting image is of one linear strip of space, stretched over time, creating a temporal image which renders the stationary background into a blur of horizontal lines and pulls movement into sharp relief.
