Exercise 5. Panning with different shutter speeds.

The objective here was to follow movement with the camera using different shutter speeds and then noting the different effects on the subject and the background. The aim was to learn how to freeze essential movement in photography. The sequence of shots are below, labelled with my comments and the camera data.

f5.6  1/250s  ISO400   Fairly clear overall.

f5.6  1/125s  ISO400  Still fairly clear.

f5.6  1/100s  ISO 400 The back-ground is losing sharpness.

f5.6  1/50s  ISO 400 Back-ground and legs are more blurred.

f7.1  1/50s  ISO 400 Back-ground and legs are increasingly blurred.

f29  1/2s  ISO 400 Subject and back-ground completely blurred
although  some details are still distinguishable.

f36  1s  ISO 400   Whole picture is very blurred.

f36  1/10s  ISO 100  The car looks to be stationary
although it is moving at about 30mph.

f8 1/1250s  ISO 1600 Much more effect of speed /movement

 Reflections on Exercise 5. Panning with different shutter speeds.


The course notes suggest that the act of panning the camera comes naturally as a technique to most people. I must be in the minority because this was certainly not natural to me. Although I managed to capture a selection of different effects I remain uncertain whether some of the effects were more a result of my poorly timed shutter release or what they were supposed to be. Try as I might I was unable to get a shot with a sharp car but blurred wheels and background and I still don't really know what I'm doing wrong. I find it incredibly difficult to focus on the subject whilst panning the camera and clearly need to practise this.

However the exercise was interesting and enjoyable, if somewhat frustrating. I learned more about how to achieve the effect of making the subject almost translucent and will be trying to improve this effect with some ghostly pictures that I have in mind.