Chasing a car

I find panning photographs quite interesting and have been quite eager to try out the technique myself for quite sometime now. Panning is the technique of shooting one object with great sharpness, keeping the object in focus and make the background blurry and out of focus. The trick here is to focus on a moving object and move the camera along with the object so that the final photograph has a sharp, in focus object and the background is blurred.

There are two major hurdles to shooting panning: First, moving your camera in a synchronized manner with the moving object. Since this requires moving the camera for a considerable time (e.g. not an instant like 1/4000second), the second hurdle is getting the right exposure during the relatively longer exposure time.

To address the issues, I decided to try out panning at dusk on a cloudy day. The advantage was that I could keep my camera open for a longer time and yet the exposure would come out nice. For example, I read in the past that shutter times between 1/40s and 1/80s are good candidates for panning, I found them very difficult for me to actually move my hands (and camera) in that time. So for my shoots, I thought I could try out with a greater exposure time and yet the shots would get a good exposure. I shot the following photo with an exposure of 1/25s and EV compensation of +1/3.

One more thing: Panning is really really hard to shoot. I deleted ~75 out of the 80 photos I shot. It takes lot of patience. So, good luck! More on panning is here.