To macjake: Panning...........

[tyro]

Hi Craig,

Thank you for your very kind remarks about this one.

The photographic holiday I mentioned was wonderful. That fellow Philip Dunn was a delightful fellow and an excellent instructor. We had a wonderful week's holiday with him in Menorca which is a lovely island. My wife came along too though she, together with another lady, was not on the photography bit of the holiday but we all ate together in the hotel and ad drinks in the bar together in the evenings. You can read more about Philip's Menorca trips here.

What was really great was that Philip took us (there were nine of us on the photographic bit of the holday) to many different situations - to the horse trotting races to practise panning, to an old fort where we could take pictures using long exposures in dark tunnels, to city streets where we could practise people shots and architectural shots, seaside places with strong backlighting and reflections, places to take portraits - it was wonderful!

Anyway, this was my first ever attempt at "panning". The technique will be totally alien to you who are used to tripods and long steady exposures. Essentially the idea is that you use a slow shutter speed and follow the subject with your camera then "squeeze" the shutter button gently. Hopefully, you will have moved the camera at exactly the same speed as the subject so that the subject appears sharp and the background blurred through motion. What shutter speed you use depends on what is the speed of the subject but it's largely "trial and error". The photographs I took here were usually at 1/30th or 1/60th second. These horses were moving quite quickly but if you eere taking shots of, say, a motor race, you might need 1/100th or 1/200th second.

What you must do, however, is make sure that you are looking directly side-on to thje subject. If the subject is coming towards you or going away from you, the apparent size of the subject will change and give a weird appearance.

The other thing is to practise moving steadily. I think the best approach is to hold the camera up to your face and brace it with your arms against your sides. Then try to swivel from your hips in a smooth movement, following the subject for a little before pressing the shutter and then "following through" afterwards, like in a golf swing.

Of course, with modern DSLRs, you can fire a "burst" and you might get a useable shot out of half a dozen. It's good fun and worth a go!

I've done a quick "Google" and I've found this page which is quite interesting. There are 40 different panning shots on it and you can study them individually - click on each picture and it opens up in a "Flickr" page and you can look at the exif data of each picture and find out what shutter speed and aperture, etc. that were used. Quite interesting!

One thing I found about this particular place in Menorca was that it was very bright and at 1/30 second I had to have the aperture down to around f/25 even at ISO 100. In conditions like that, an ND filter might be an advantage.

I hope some of this is of use to you. As I say, I am no expert at all but it's another fun aspect of photography!

Cheers,

John.