Panning, The Other Motion Capture
When you have been watching things go around tracks for a little while, getting something different comes to mind.
With cars, it is usually a panning shot, but this can be difficult, sometimes impossible with erratically moving subjects.
Panning needs a few things;
A subject that is moving predictably left to right and stays the same size.
A fairly stable subject, with few moving parts and those parts should be contained. Heads in particular should be still, wheels turning looks good.
A shutter speed that is slow enough to blur the background and some moving parts. The slower the better, but I find about 1/90 to 1/125 is about right.
A smooth follow action that starts before and finishes after the image capture.
Turns out trotting or harness racing has the right balance of elements.
The driver and horse tend to be quite stable, the wheels turn neatly and the track is smooth and clean.
The next day at the horse racing I had little luck, but that was expected (too much head movement).
Odd and unwieldy as they look, these things move, something I wanted to convey. The key here is the still head.
The “frozen" action shot lacks that feeling of speed and danger (another rider came off on this corner and went home in an ambulance).
Bikes can work, sprinters also, but rarely distance runners, field sports can offer up the odd win, but generally smooth motion sports only.
Even foreground distractions can be mitigated. With cars also, it allows for wheel movement, that is far more dynamic and interesting than frozen wheels.
This one is a split between slow enough to read the background, fast enough to feel like a pan. This is a combination of a slightly faster shutter (1/180) and a slower car in the corner.
Not a pan, but the “grail” shot I guess is tight and panned.
The only issue is, if you get too carried away with panning, you are not prepared for the rare “incident” at the faster shutter speeds required.
Longer lenses are generally easier because they give you longer sweeps of a relatively similarly sized subject, but the most dramatic can come from wide angle lenses.