Panning

Panning is used to create a sense of motion into an image, keeping the subject sharp whilst allowing moving parts and the background to exhibit motion blur giving an impression of speed and movement.

Basic panning involves shooting a moving image whilst moving the lens in the same direction of travel as your subject over the duration of the exposure, which must be slow enough to record the movement. For example the image of the fast moving car in Figure 1 was taken at 1/100th sec, a shutter speed slow enough to record the camera movement along the horizontal axis as blur, whilst the car traveling with the camera movement has remained sharp.

 

To achieve this we have set the camera to Shutter Priority, (TV or S) set the focusing to continuous, and set a shutter speed slow enough to allow for the movement to show. This shutter speed will depend on how fast your subject is moving and how much movement blur you want to show, so choosing shutter speeds that suit you becomes a matter of personal taste and is subject to your own judgment and skill. We also set the camera to fire continuously when the shutter button is pressed, allowing for a spread and selection of images to choose from. As the car has come past the centre focus point was used and the camera "panned" from right to left trying to keep the focus point in exactly the same place, keeping the car sharp whilst the background is blurred from the camera movement.

With aircraft using a slow shutter speed and panning the camera along the axis of travel is a useful technique to use, particularly with propeller aircraft where you want to keep a sense of movement in the propeller area to give the image a more dynamic look.

With jet aircraft there is no propeller to blur, and generally if you are shooting up into the sky there is no background to blur to impart a sense of movement, so fast shutter speeds of around 1/1000th of a second and above can be used to shoot these aircraft. This will make it easier to get sharp shots of these aircraft, although even at 1/1000th of a second panning the subject can make a difference to over all image sharpness.

Propeller aircraft are a different matter, and the general feeling is that they look better with blurred propellers, which will mean using a shutter speed slow enough to allow propeller blurring whilst panning the image to keep the subject sharp.

For example, Figure 2 was taken at 1/1000th sec, and this fast shutter speed has only allowed very little propeller blur, where as Figure 3 was taken at 1/320th sec and panned to allow much greater blurring around the propeller blades. We find that 1/320th sec is a good place to start from, allowing a reasonable amount of blur whilst still keeping the over all success rate of shots reasonably high.

As a general rule of thumb we tend to recommend the use of shutter speeds around 1/1000th sec and above for jets and no faster then 1/320th for propeller driven aircraft. Camera is usually set in TV (shutter priority where you set the shutter speed and the camera alters the aperture to suit), continuous fire mode and continuous focus mode. Iso is set to as low as possible to still achieve the shutter speeds you need without underexposing the images.

Helicopters tend to travel slower then fixed wing aircraft, and rotor blades as well as being a lot bigger then most propellers also tend to turn slower, meaning even slower shutter speeds for them, making them quite challenging to photograph with blade movement. Again the secret is slower shutter speeds and panning in the direction of travel.

 

 

 

Figure 4: 1/250th sec

 

Figure 5: 1/125 the sec

 

Figure 6: 1/60th sec