The Art of Panning in Street Photography
…and why every photographer should master this technique
Today, the quality of the photograph is often measured based on the technical brilliance of it. Exposed correctly, focused well, edited to perfection. I’ve recently had a feeling that mastering these is all you need to capture the audience. Sometimes it’s true.
Regardless of your photography niche, adding the long exposure technique to your arsenal of skills will expand the portfolio variety.
Shooting with slow shutter speed, or “long exposure” on the streets adds a different dimension to images. They’ll become nostalgic, mysterious, more art-like rather than a pure documentary.
How long is long?
Slowing down the shutter speed to a certain speed will most certainly yield blurry images, or at least a part of them will be.
In general, you should be able to capture a sharp image with the shutter speed as slow as 1/60s. Slowing down more requires much more hand stability and still objects. Using a tripod is helps with the first one, but it’s not as convenient while shooting street photography.
To create art-like images handheld, you can maybe even go as 1/15s or 1/10s. Sharpness is not the goal here.
Panning vs. long exposure street photography
When you consider dialling in a slow shutter speed, say 1/15, you can achieve two things. Holding a camera still gets you a sharp background and blurred subject or, moving the camera with the subject gets you a blurred background and sharp subject. Like on examples below.
What are the ideal subjects for panning photography?
Simply, anything that moves. Cars, trams, trains, cyclists, skaters, pedestrians, or anything maintaining constant speed and direction is easier to use as a subject in panning photography.
How to achieve the panning effect?
To capture your subject sharp, it must move perpendicularly to your position, so it moves neither towards nor away from you. Imagine standing on a side of a parking lot at the end of which, a car is moving from left to right. If there is enough distance between you and the moving car, it will show sharp in the image. This is because the change in distance during the movement would be too small to throw it out of focus.
Now imagine you are on a side of a road and the same car is driving on it. While you focus, the car drives towards you, therefore changing its distance to your camera. It would be rather hard to get both a panning effect and a sharp subject in such a case.
If the above did not make much sense, remember this rule: for better panning photography results, put some distance between the camera and the subject.
And what of the F-stop?
You already know the slow shutter speed is key to get the panning effect. At 1/15, quite a lot of light hits your film/sensor. To eliminate overexposure, step down your lens to f8 to f11. In case you shoot at night, wider apertures would work too.
One other thing, remember to switch your autofocus to continuous, or a subject tracking mode, should your camera allow it. If you shoot a manual lens, you can pre-focus at a point, where you know your subject will move towards and shoot this way.
Remember, the most important “tool” in photography is the person holding that little black box. Your experience, knowledge, state of mind, or vision, will all play a major part in how your images look.
Knowing the technique is an enabler of expression, not its condition.
Being deliberate and knowing what technique to choose to communicate what message, if any, is the prerequisite to creating meaningful art.
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