Panning is an effective technique which lets you capture action and movement in photography. The basic idea behind panning is following the subject with the camera as it crosses your field of view, resulting in the subject being sharp and the rest of the shot including background image being blurred. Relatively sharp subject and blurry background gives the feeling of movement and speed. It’s particularly useful in capturing any fast moving subject like racing cars, running animals, cyclist etc.
If you want to master panning technique, first and most importantly, you have to follow few simple rules and then practice with patience. Do not get frustrated with some blurry subjects initially. Panning is a skill which can be learned over the time with lots of experiments. Take a little slower shutter speed, follow your subject moving your camera and take a shot. Here are few guidelines to follow for getting best results using panning technique.
1. Use Shutter Priority Mode.
2. Start from slow shutter speed (1/15 sec or 1/30 sec) and go up and down little bit as you need it depending up on the speed of subjects and lighting conditions.
3. Shoot in Continuous Autofocus Mode because your subject and camera are constantly moving in proportion to each other. This way camera continuously track and focus moving subject.
4. If your camera doesn’t support Autofocus then you have to judge traveling path of your subject, determine your subject’s final point for shooting and pre-focus on that point.
5. Use Continuous Shooting Mode or Burst Mode. In this way you can have multiple shots and will have flexibility to choose best among many shots.
6. Position yourself in front of your moving subject parallelly. Greater distance from subject does seem to decrease apparent speed, but it also reduces the effect of panning, and the effect is often why you’re doing it.
7. Place your subject position fixed in your viewfinder and smoothly move your camera as subject moves on it’s track.
8. Continuously follow track of moving subject and then take a shot and keep moving camera as if you are taking shot. This will create soft transition and give better result.
9. If you need extra support for your heavy camera and big lens, you can use tripod which supports panning feature. It gives extra stability to minimize motion blur on the main subject.
Image Credit : AdoramaTV
Exposure : 1/30 sec Aperture : f/14.0 Focal Length : 200mm ISO : 100
If you are learning this technique, do not expect to get a great shot for the first time. You have to keep experimenting with different settings until you get the best result. Also using this technique, you shouldn’t expect super sharp result of your subject. Panning technique allows you to shoot the moving subject smoothly and at the same time gives you feeling of motion of the subject. If you are lucky and get a great shot using this technique, you will get your subject relatively sharper than the motion blur background which is the main idea of this technique to give sense of moving subject.
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About UM3$H
I used to always wonder whether the camera needs to be mounted on another moving object to get the panning effect….Well explained..
Jai,
You can also use tripod for better support if your tripod supports for panning. I recently bought Manfrotto tripod with 498RC2 ball head which supports panning.
Well.. believe it or not.. I took a week to learn this!
You need lots of practice to get nice panning shot. I am still working to get the best shot.
Can this be achieved if you were traveling along side the subject in a moving vehicle? Or do you have to be static? Thanks so much!
The main idea is to move your camera against background which gives sense of motion in slower shutter speed. When you move your camera along with subject, subject is realtively in constant motion with camera and by using slower shutter speed, you will be able to freeze your subject but producing blurry background.
To be honest with you, I haven’t tried in this situation but theoretically, when you are in moving vechile shooting another moving subjects, I guess it depends on velocity and relative speed of camera and subjects. If both are in same speed, I doubt you will get same result as when you are static and panning camera along with subject.