Extreme Panning


Panning is a great technique for giving the impression of speed, which is very useful when photographing race cars.  The usual technique is to set the camera shutter speed to around 1/125 or 1/60 and move the camera with the car to keep the subject sharp and blur the background.  At this sort of shutter speed the hit rate is about one picture in every two.

Sometimes though it is good to drop the shutter speed down to 1/30 or 1/15, but it is harder to get a 'keeper', the hit rate dropping to 1-in-5 to 1-in-10. However when it does work the effect is more dramatic.



Using a shutter speed below 1/15 is pretty extreme but using a wide angle lens helps to keep the subject smaller in the frame and sharpness isn't so critical.  It is also good to have parts of the subject blurred as well.  Now on a sunny day it can be difficult to get the shutter speed slow enough, especially if the lowest ISO setting is 200 like it is on the Fujifilm X-T1 (for RAW images).  This means you might have to resort to fitting a neutral density filter (ND) to block some of the light hitting the sensor.

These shots were all taken on the Fujifilm X-T1 and XF10-24mm fitted with a Lee Big Stopper 10x ND which gave me a shutter speed of around 1/8 with the ISO between 800 and 3200 depending on if the sun was shining or behind clouds.  

The effects given by using the ND filter are quite dramatic and the colours had shifted slightly as well, which I accentuated in Lightroom.





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