Introduction

Found a couple of panning shots taken from my recent trip in France… I had intentionally taken those shots with various setting to share with people who are interested in panning shots, the impact of the setting.

Technique

Certainly just for sharing, not a professional in any way and I might be wrong, though I have often been successful taking such shots….

The following are auto-cart racing taken in Normandy, they are not true professional but the carts has a maximum speed of close to 100km/h as far as I was told…

In panning shots, there are a lot of factors to get THE picture that you want. I laid them in the following for your considerations and thoughts:

The path

Predictable or not, whether it moves parallel to the lens or may move away suddenly. If unpredictable, panning may not be possible.

The lighting condition

Too bright or too dark, chances of success is low. Has to be optimum, preferably heavy cloudy sky.

Shuttle Speed and Aperture controls

Being the most important factor. Also dependent on what level of blurrness you want on the BG and sharpness on the subject. Preferably higher Aperture to compensate if your subject moves “in and out” of the plane parallel to the lens. Slower shuttle of no more than 1/100 (depending on your lens being use, super long telephoto, can be higher as it is subject to blur compared to a wide angle (super slow required) for example, so no hard and fast rule.

Flash

Possibly to freeze the subject a little more if the flash can reach… but… may make the picture a little unnatural. (Personally I never use flash)

Other considerations

Sure there might be other considerations, but I live by the above 3 basic principles as panning shots are already complicated by itself.
Picture 1: F10, 1/160, ISO 100: As you can see, I got the picture, subject is sharp, but the background is not blurr enough… F10 helps to cover depth sharpness while 1/160 is generally too slow to capture such a fast car, thus gives effect on panning… but not enough, though the subject appears sharper compared to the next picture…

Picture 2: F16, 1/30, ISO 100: Now there is a distinct difference… The background shows very good motion blurr… gives superb effect on speed while the subject is sharp (not as sharp as the first one but good enough) Anything slower than 1/30 requires superb skills of following them at the correct speed… I have done before at 1/8 no more.. lots depends on luck.

Hope the above is informative and feel free to comment if I got it wrong in any way, we are all here to learn from each other… mine is never from text book but rather from experiences and talking to the pros… Hopefully we see more panning pictures from all of you with birds rather than cars

Frankly, I never tried this on birds before, thought their flights are unpredicable, thus Hilary is really the master of flights IMHO…..
Photographs and article are copyright of Eric Pooi