People have comfort zones. Most people prefer not to venture outside our comfort zones, but then, by not extending ourselves, our zones slowly but surely contract.The same is true for photographers. All photographers (myself included) have techniques / styles we’re most happy with. This morning I decided to try to expand my range of techniques, by doing something I’ve never tried before - panning. I’ve mimicked the effect in Photoshop, using the motion blur filter, which can be very effective, but there’s nothing like doing it in camera!

I set my aperture down to f/7.1 which gave me a shutter speed of 1/60s (and also a depth of field which was more generous with focussing errors), which I thought would be adequately slow to allow me to blur the background by panning, but not so slow as to have vertical wobble. Then, I tried on cars, buses, etc, and found I just wasn’t quick enough or practised enough, so I set my sights a little lower, and shot the cyclists.

I came up with three pretty resasonable shots, though this was my favourite. I thought that there’s enough blur to be interesting, and I especially like that the cyclist’s foot pushing the pedal is also somewhat blurred. I considered cloning out the pedestrian in the shot, but I decided that

  1. I like having him in there, and
  2. I’m trying to stay out of Photoshop now, both for photographic purity, and to smooth my workflow.

Go on, try something new, you never know, you might like it!