So I found myself standing in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida one late afternoon with my camera in hand. Since I have been working on my book project of Tampa Bay, I have shot just about every interesting building and landmark the city has to offer, but it was too early to go home.
Being that it is still the wet season in Florida (where it rains for about 30 minutes about every day), the skies were grey, and very little sunshine was abound. So, instead of packing up and heading home, I headed down to Bayshore Boulevard and sat down on the curb to try a real fun technique, panning.
St. Petersburg is a great place to pan, whether it is cars, from the ordinary to the exotic, but also people, bicyclists, skateboarders, buses to just about anything that is moving down the boulevard. Since the skies were overcast, it was perfect to get some nice slow shutter speeds without the use of a 2 or 3 stop neutral density filter.
I found a good spot on the street that I observed where a fair amount of traffic would go by, and typically at a pretty consistent speed, which would make it easy to pan. I set my camera in Shutter Priority mode, and set my shutter speed at 1/20th of a second to start. My ISO was set at 100, so all I had to do was track the subjects as they moved by. The other critical setting was to but my camera into Servo Mode, which will track my subjects as they came speeding by. I also made sure I was in burst mode, which depending on your camera make, will fire off several frames a second which will help get that perfect picture.
For the rest of the afternoon I sat there and panned subjects, and once you get the hang of it, it is a great way to get some very unusual and creative shots. So the next time you run short of ideas, give panning a try, you'll have a blast doing it!
Robert La Follette
www.robertlafollette.com
