Panning

The week’s assignment, over at Digital Photography School, is "panning." A technique that blurs the background while keeping the topic of interest focused. It takes practice.

Took my camera on the afternoon’s walk and shot cars over on McNeil. I seem to have the blurred background down. Unfortunately, so is much of the subject. This is going to take some effort.

I also have a new lesson learned. Since you want to slow the shutter down, you set the mode control for "S." That worked OK but the photo’s came out noticeably blue.

It seems the manual controls also bring up the White Balance options, if set. So it was using my 3000K from the night before. I’ll have to keep in mind what I’ve changed. Just powering down doesn’t make some things go away. (Which is good overall.)

Poking around further; the Wikipedia entry on panning suggests that I may have slowed the shutter down too much. A fast vehicle, F1 racer, can be caught at 1/125th. A runner might be closer to 1/60th. I was taking the cars at 1/20 to 1/30. So, I might have more success with a faster shutter.