The following YouTube video titled "Roller Examples" offers a great example of rollers in the air, with each clip followed by a slow motion of the same clip. As Brian McCormick, who shot the video (and who is now out of Rollers, apparently), points out: Illusion really does trump reality, in that a lot of birds that would look to be spinning properly to the majority of fanciers, in reality show definite deficiencies when slowed down. For the most part, only a handful of the birds in the video are shown to actually be rolling correctly when the footage is slowed down, even though they may look pretty good to most eyes in real time.
From my own observations, I found that I was able to detect the faults in real-time (a change of wing here and there, a slight wobble, etc) that later became very obvious in the slow motion, while at the same time, some birds in slow motion clearly accelerated in the velocity of each revolution after the first few feet of the roll, a fact that was not something I had noticeably detected in the real time segment. Sometimes your eyes just cannot react fast enough to see everything taking place.
Despite this, many fanciers agree that Mr. McCormick's videos are probably the finest representations of the Birmingham Roller on the entire web, which really just goes to show how illusive the ideal Birmingham Roller really is.
Enjoy!
