Panning

[minijag]

Hello everyone.

I was recently offered a Canon EOS 450D, which I find an excellent camera (at least, to my standards) and it has allowed my return to photography, as I was a bit far from it for some years.

One of my hobbies being car racing, I went to several events and races over the past months, and, of course, took my camera with me.

One of the techniques I wanted to use was panning.

I’ve always enjoyed those excellent images that you have on your website, of extra sharp cars moving over blurry backgrounds.

So, I tried to apply some of the advices that I had read on web tutorials and, to my surprise, the first results overcame my best expectations.

But, I’m afraid it might have been some kind of “beginners’ luck”, as my recent results are a bit disappointing.

So here are some pictures and my reactions to them (I’ll use flickr links to present the images):

These two aren’t quite “panning shots”, but I used the same kind of setting (Shutter Priority, All Focus, Shutter Speed of around 125/160/200) and became really surprised by the overall result – the car looks sharp, even if the background isn’t blurry enough (but that wasn’t the intention).

Of course, the fact that I used a telephoto lens (EF-S 55-250mm IS f/4.0-5.6), might have helped because of the shallower DOF (I am probably writing a lot of nonsense, but I would appreciate any kind of remark, so I can really understand what I’m doing…).

Flickr Photo Download: 5

Flickr Photo Download: 4

Next two images (I think we can consider these as true panning shots) were taken on a race event.

Apart from some details (the place where I was didn’t allow a clear view of the cars, so there are some bushes, trees, etc, that shouldn’t be on the shot, but I couldn’t avoid it), I like the shots and I was really surprised with the result, with only a couple of hours of tests before taking them.

Of course, I’m not expecting this to be that easy, but the shots really made me feel like I could do something nice with my camera – an absolutely great feeling, by the way.

Boavista 2009 6 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Boavista 2009 1 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

But now come the bad ones.

Another event, some faster cars (I should say that the previous ones were taken near a left hand turn, so the cars, although moving fast enough for the blur effect to occur, they were not that fast).

These cars were doing 200 kmh or more, as the next turn was a bit far from this place.
On this first image, I think I got a good result, as the car is sharp and the background is blurry enough (I don’t need to stress out that this one was already edited, using a sharpness tool on FSViewer – I didn’t have PS4 back then – and cropped), although the light is not that good.

Flickr Photo Download: n22

But on this one, the car itself is not that sharp, which spoils the wanted effect (as you can see I didn’t even edit it, but if I had cropped it, it would look even worse, right?).

Flickr Photo Download: IMG_5806

This one was cropped, just to show that the car isn’t sharp, at all

Flickr Photo Download: IMG_5704

I shot in burst mode and many of the images in each sequence look the same (not sharp at all).

The last images were taken at the last event I attended. The result is very disappointing. I was using RAW for the first time, but I don’t think this could be the reason for the bad outcome (nevertheless, to put them on Flickr, I just converted them to JPEG and reduced the size a bit).

I might add that these were taken within a much smaller distance to the cars and the lens used was not the telephoto, but the 18-55 kit lens.

Some of them were shot with a BW polarizer filter, with the sole purpose of avoiding sun reflexes over the cars.

I would guess that the fact that I was standing too close to the cars could have affected the end result, because when shooting from a distance my movement is slower (consequently, not shaking the camera so badly) than when one sits closer to the cars (am I writing rubbish again?).

On the other hand, there’s another detail I don’t like: even on the ones that appear to be sharper, not all the car is sharp. There are some in which the front of the car is sharp enough, but not the rear, etc. Could this be solved by choosing one focus point instead of using several?

Flickr Photo Download: IMG_8651

IMG_8736 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

So: I would very much appreciate your help in turning this subject a little more understandable and helping me become a little more confident (less disappointed, actually) with my photos.

Thank You in advance!

[minijag]

You know what!? I already found a possible explanation for what ever happened with the last pictures: I don't know if I can confirm this by reviewing the EXIF data, but somewhere along that day I changed the settings from AI Servo (the correct setting for panning, as long as I know) to AI Focus.

Could this be the cause?