Circular Panning vs. Horizontal Panning Photography

One of the great things about photography is that there are times when bad light, poor light is good light. And this is the perfect case, where we've got low light downtown now. The sun is just about edging to come up. So it's a good time to come downtown and shoot panning shots. And panning shots can be anything from shooting people, to shooting cars, to shooting the subway, to shooting the cable cars that come by. And there's a couple different ways of doing that. One is there's the straight horizontal pan, where you're staying at the same speed and clicking your shutter as your subject goes by. Another way is to help kind of accentuate speed and motion even more as they go by, rotate your camera as they go by, still maintaining the same speed that your sub's going by. And that's kind of the critical point here, to get a good pan. I've always found that good pans tend to happen, cities, games, places like this, between a quarter second and a 30th of a second, not one second, not two seconds, that's too long. Because if you think about it, if somebody's walking by, they're walking like this. You'd have to have this motion as well as this motion. So a quarter second to a 30th of a second enables you to still show speed. And you'd be amazed, if a subject is moving at even a 30th of a second, you still get a blur, but keeping your subject sharp. That's the hardest part about pans is learning to keep the same speed. Now, I'm downtown today, and I'm shooting a tram as it comes by. So I've actually got a wide angle. I don't even need to look through the lens, because I know I'm getting this whole scene. So it enables me to actually watch my subject with greater concentration, than trying to worry about composition, looking through the lens. So I can just go this way with it. Makes it very simple. Same this way. When they come by, I'll just rotate my camera as they go by, trying to maintain the same speed as I can go. So some of the considerations that you have to make. Usually the first thing I do when I get here is I automatically drop it right down to F22. Why, 'cause I wanna see how slow I can get. Once it gets bright here, you know, I'll have to stop down even more if I had to. but I'm trying to find out where I can automatically get myself down between a quarter and a 30th of a second and then just pan my subject as they go by. Now I can hear the tram coming again. I've still got light. The sunlight's only hitting the top of the buildings. I've got one more opportunity to get this before the light just gets too good to shoot. Here it comes. Let's get a shot. I've prefocused I'm good to go. I think the conductor even smiled. Fantastic. Dead-on.