On my way home yesterday evening I saw a garda take a driver to task for using his mobile phone while driving. Unluckily for the driver, he was doing this while stopped at traffic lights, with the garda car stopped in the next lane, so he could have little dispute with the garda. Presumably he was too busy talking on the phone to notice the garda car. Which is I guess the thinking behind that particular law. It reminded me of a photograph I took in Malaysia last summer, which I’ve posted as today’s image.
You see all sorts of activities on mopeds and scooters in Malaysia, and any number of passengers. I think it was in Terenganu that we saw families of four on one of these – father driving, child number one behind, mother behind them with child number two in a sling. Seriously. Compared to that this guy texting as he drove was probably mild. And at least he was wearing a helmet.
This shot was taken in Penang on the same day that I captured the street scene I posted last week. In fact, this is one of the panning shots that I was trying to get, as mentioned in the that post. It’s probably my third most successful panning shots, after the prize-winning scooter in Rome and the cyclist in Munich. The principle for capturing a shot like this is always the same. Slow the shutter speed down a tad, use a continuous focus mode on the camera, and track the subject from, in this case right to left, pressing the shutter while continuing to move the camera after the shot is taken. This step is particularly important, and is akin to following through on a golf swing after the ball has been struck.
I find that the slower the subject is moving, the slower the shutter speed needed to get good results. I don’t know if there’s a logic to this, but it feels like it might make sense. Hence why the scooter in Rome (moving fast) was captured at 1/50s, the cyclist in Munich, moving slow at 1/15s and this guy, at a speed somewhere in the middle, at 1/30s. I suppose the faster the subject is moving, the faster you pan your camera, the less time the shutter needs to be open to get the motion blur in the background.
All other exposure settings (aperture, ISO) follow on from the shutter, so it can be easiest to shoot these sorts of shots in shutter-priority mode to let the camera do the thinking.
Exposure aside, other tips are to watch the background and try to keep it clear, take lots and lots of shots, and hope that your subject doesn’t move too many limbs while the shutter is open so that he or she appears reasonably sharp. And don’t worry about pin-sharpness here – because the subject is going to be against a very blurry background, anything approaching sharp will look good.
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