Travel & Humanitarian Photos
My picture of a boy cycling, hands-free, along a street in Varanassi appears in this month’s Photo Plus ‘Inspirations” pages and is a good introduction to my top Top Ten Tips for Successful Panning:
Panning, or following a subject with your camera, is a great technique to use of you want to introduce a sense a movement into your pictures. Traditionally, a panned shot will have the subject sharply focussed whilst the background has dissolved into a blur.
The shot above would probably not have conveyed the speed of the boy on the bicycle nearly as well if a fast shutter speed had been used. Freezing the action and the background would have meant that the sense of movement would have been lost.
1. Choose your location carefully. You might be standing in the same place for a while so make sure that it’s out of the way of passing traffic and that you’re not blocking the pavement (sidewalk). Pick a place with regular passing traffic of the sort you wish to photograph and make sure the background is reasonably attractive.
2. Get your stance right. Choose if you’re going to be shooting left to right or right to left. Personally, I get better shots moving from left to right, it feels like a more natural direction for me but go with what feels best to you. Stand facing the point at which your pan movement will end. So, for left to right shots, stand facing towards the right. This helps the body twist naturally to the finish position.
3. Practice a few times without taking a shot. You’re looking for a fluid movement where you pick up your subject at one end and follow all the way through to the other end and your finish position. Keep practising until you feel you have the timing right and you can keep the subject in the frame throughout the panning movement.
4. Choose a shutter speed of perhaps 1/30th for bikes, rickshaws and taxis or 1/20th for pedestrians. You can start at a faster speed, 1/60th perhaps, and slow down as you improve your technique.
5. Pre-focus on a point at which you’re going to shoot your picture. Pick a point in the road and focus on that. Then turn the auto-focus off and be careful not to move the focussing ring again. Alternatively, use the tracking focus function if your camera has one but you’ll need to make sure that you’re focussing on the subject and not the background.
6. Set your exposure manually. Take a reading from a neutral section of the scene and set the aperture to balance with the shutter speed you’ve selected. Using the Shutter Priority mode on your camera is OK but exposure can be thrown out by subjects in very dark or very bright clothing.
7. So, you’re standing facing away from your start position, you have the camera set up with manual exposure, manual focus. Time to test out your technique. Pick out a subject and follow it with your camera as you did when practising. Trip the shutter half-way through your panning movement but – and this is crucial – follow through. Often, photographers trying this technique will stop moving at the moment they trip the shutter and the secret is to keep moving. You should keep following the subject even after you’ve heard the shutter fire. it’s the sporting equivalent of “following through” in a golf or cricket stroke.
8. This is one of those times when it’s OK to check the LCD screen to see what you’ve got. AFTER you’ve looked back down the road to make sure that you’re not about to miss something really eye-catching. Zoom in on the LCD screen image to check the sharpness of your subject. Wheels and feet can be blurred to emphasise the movement but the important things, heads and shoulders for example, should be relatively sharp.
9. Practice. It’s another blessing of the digital age that we can stand in one place and fire 100 frames in order to perfect the technique. It doesn’t matter if they’re all deleted afterwards, the important thing is to get the movement and the timing right.
10. Practice some more. OK, that’s not really a separate tip but whoever heard of a list of Top Nine tips? Seriously, the more you do it, the better you’ll get. And like practising for a big game, you don’t have to wait until you’re on that magical holiday of a lifetime to start working on your panning technique, practice at home so that you’re on top form when it comes to the big match.
OK, wayyyyy too many sporting references in this post.