Excercise - Panning with different shutter speeds.

The subject i chose for this excercise was slightly different to the last one, i used passing vehicles on a street and tried to frame the shot so that half the frame was background and half the moving subject. My original attempt at using birds in flight as the subject was binned because the subject was too fast to track and keep central. I used shutter speeds of 1/400, 1/250, 1/160, 1/100, 1/60, 1/40, 1/25, 1/15, 1/5 and 0.30 sec (in order below) and tried to pan with the subject at a focal length of roughly 120mm. My technique at following the moving target (or lack of) effected some of the slower speed shots and camera shake is evident. Results below:




For me the most successful image is between 1/60 and 1/15. Both are quite well balanced between background blur and subject sharpness. 1/15 is sharp because the panning was successful whereas 1/60 is sharp enough because of the shutter speed.

This is something i think i can apply when tracking moving targets in future. If i get a single attempt to capture the shot, a slower shutter speed would be useful but if i can repeat the shot until the tracking is right i could slow the speed for more background blur.