Scooter in Rome

A couple of weeks ago I posted a shot I captured of a cyclist in Munich and referred to a previous successful attempt at panning to capture motion on my visit to Rome.  This is the photo I was referring to, and I’m posting it today to mark the fact that tonight it is in contention for Colour Print of the Year in the Dublin Camera Club.

Update: This post proved a little bit prophetic – the photo above won the Colour Print of the Year title in the new member category at the camera club for the 2008/09 season.  Happy days.  The judge (a commercial photographer) suggested I contact Suzuki (maker of the Burgman scooter) to see if they are interested in licensing the shot.

Much like that photograph of a few weeks back, this shot was captured using the burst mode to fire off a rapid sequence of 5 images as the scooter went by.  Finding scooters to photograph in Rome was not a difficult task – they are everywhere.  What made this image stand out over other attempts though was the intensity of the colour of this particular scooter, and how it is well suited to the background of the photograph.

Very often in a photograph it’s too easy to forget the background during composition or capture, focusing attention instead (pardon the pun) on the subject, most typically situated in the foreground.  This image highlights the importance of a background to a photograph however.  There’s sufficient detail there to hold the viewer’s interest, but it is also sufficiently blurred in this case to ensure that it doesn’t detract too much from the main subject.  The blurring here is due to the movement of the camera and the slow shutter speed.

You’ll notice a softening of the background in most portraits you’ll ever see.  This is achieved by using a wide aperture to give a narrow depth of field, and so ensure that only a very narrow range of distances from front to back of the image is in focus – and more often than not this field is centered about the subject.  It universally works well for portraits, and for many other subjects where the background should add a little bit of interest, create a little bit of context, or infer a little bit of movement, but where the foreground subject should remain the centre of the viewer’s attention.  A panning shot like this is one such subject.