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Panning Fun

Photo panning is a technique of photographing that involves following a moving subject in a manner that blurs the background and creates a sense of motion of the subject.

I decided to try this technique and it mostly involved experimentation and practice. The results were my first efforts and I am hopeful that those with much more experience than I will share their advice and expertise here with their comments. I am sure that my comments here relate mostly to the circumstances and environment I encountered in my "trial" and that there are lots more experiences and ideas out there.

Here are some of the things I learned about panning:

- Practice, practice, practice... perhaps 10 to 20% of the shots have some redeeming value in the end, even after much practice, and I am still learning each time I try.
- What you learn about focus mode, ISO, shutter or aperture mode and whether you use a tripod or monopod and whether to use the vibration reduction option will vary depending on your camera and the light or the nature of the subject... for example, how fast were the cars travelling? In my test photos, I came to the conclusion that shutter priority was by far the best setting, that my ISO settings between 200 and 500 were the best with 200 giving me the best clarity of the foreground subject but 500 giving me the best panning results and 800 over-exposing the background, the vibration reduction mode off, camera hand-held and circular polarizer pre-set for where I was going to depress the shutter release. I chose hand-held because I have a moveable focus point in my viewfinder and so I set it on the main subject and follow it until I release the shutter... I couldn’t do that properly on the tripod. I found that 1/100th of a second was too fast and captured too much of the background without blur, 1/50th got decent results, but 1/30th got the best results... slower and everything was blurred from the background to the main subject.
- Not all out-of-focus main subject photos are discards... some can be post-processed with various techniques.
- How close you are to the subject makes a difference... if you are using a zoom lens, you can get significantly different effects by varying the closeness, but generally if you are too close and lose the background, you don’t get the panning effect of a moving background. Being further back gives perspective and you are best to rely upon cropping to get what you like in the final version.
- The main subject doesn’t need to be in the centre of the photo... you need the background to show the motion and speed effect... decide that first if you are setting your focus point and doing continuous focusing.
- How you stand makes a crucial difference... I found that I needed first to decide where I wanted to actually trigger the shot, so I faced that way, widened my stance, locked my elbows in, then twisted at the waist to start to track my subject. Keeping the plane level was important and while you can get some interesting effects if you don’t keep level, they don’t give the full impression of background movement or blur that makes the subject seem to be moving fast.
- If you are using a circular polarizing lens, pre-set it for where you will trigger the exposure... the polarizing effect will change with angle of the sun and sometimes it does not produce a friendly result.
- Sometimes it is best to trigger the exposure when the subject passes directly in front of you for maximum effect, but you can get some interesting results when the subject has passed you and is going away... you can get a great blur effect with added diminishing perspective.
- When you trigger the subject, smoothly continue the swing past that point... some cameras have a longer lag time for the exposure and this will be most noticeable when the light is lower and the lag time is longer.
- How you use your focal options is important... if you have a continuous focus mode you can usually apply it two ways..
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