Capture motion through panning

A picture is worth a thousand words, but even with such a verbose image, capturing the feeling of motion and freezing it in time is still tricky.

One of the best ways to do that is through the use of panning – by blurring out the background while keeping the moving subject in the foreground in focus. You’ve likely seen the technique in pictures a hundred times, but here’s how you do it. The first thing you need to realize is that this technique requires practice. You’ll find that about 1 in 10 pictures comes out looking right. This success ratio will improve over time, but it’s really hit or miss a lot of the time.

Set your camera to continuous shooting mode. If you’ve got an older or less expensive camera you’ll end up shooting two or three frames a second. With a higher end camera, you can shoot more than eight or ten frames per second. The idea is to shoot lots. The more you do, the better your chances of getting that 1 in 10 shot.

Use a continuous focusing mode so that your focus doesn’t “lock”. You’ll be shooting a moving subject, and we want to track it as much as possible.

Now set your shutter speed. You need to have a shutter speed fast enough to keep the subject itself sharp, but slow enough to blur out the background while you pan. This threshold will depend on how fast you’re panning and how fast your subject is moving, but start at somewhere between 1/60 and 1/200.

Now you just need to perfect your technique. The trick is tracking the subject at their speed and panning in one direction (if you’re panning horizontally, don’t waver up and down). This is where image stabilization often comes in handy.

I find that if I point straight ahead with my body and tilt at the hips 45 degrees to one side, that’s where I want to start my shot. As I pan, I’ll end up tilting my hips 45 degrees in the other direction. During this movement, the shutter is firing at my cameras maximum framerate, and I can then review the images afterwards. Be advised though the LCD screen image is tough to judge for clarity.

Good shooting!