Frozen in motion

Photographing a steady stream of runners going past in a marathon can get a bit monotonous if you use the same lens, the same framing, and the same style of shot all the time.  So I found, quite quickly, when photographing the runners at the 18 mile mark on the Dublin Marathon course last Monday.  In order to make things a little more interesting for me, and to help achieve some more creative shots, I tried some different techniques, with mixed results.  The panning shots in particular proved difficult to get right, and today’s image is the best I managed.

Panning is a great technique for moving subjects, and allows you convey the motion while keeping the subject (or part of it) relatively sharp and easy to identify.  There are a couple of simple principles that apply for a successful panning shot.

Obviously the subject needs to be moving, and ideally at a relatively fast pace.  I find that the faster the subject, the easier it is to get a good panning shot, primarily because you can get away with slightly faster shutter speeds.   You need to track the subject before, during and after the exposure – I find the follow through is especially important in getting a clean image.   And your choice of shutter speed is important – you want it slow enough to show motion blur in the background, but not too slow that it becomes impossible to keep the subject in the same position in the frame as you track it.

A final consideration for a panning shot, as I found here, is how the subject is moving.  For instance, a scooter will move relative to the background, but no part of it moves out of sync with any other part.  When your subject is an elite marathon runner though in the 1/15s that it takes to get the exposure his legs and arms are going to be moving all over the place relative to each other, and so it’s all but impossible to get a sharp shot of his entire body.  What you need to hope for then is that some part of him is sharp and that kind of becomes a reference point by which the viewers eye can distinguish a panning shot from an out-of-focus one.

In this case I tried to time the exposure so that his arms were at the apex of their swing and this minimizes how much they move during the 1/15s.  Where did I come up with a shutter speed of 1/15s?  From experience, I find shutter speeds around that work well.  The rest of the exposure settings follow to just give me a good frame – for panning shots the normal rules of exposure apply.  So in this case, I was at ISO 200 as it was a bright day, and in shutter-priority mode to stick at 1/15s, the camera threw back f/18 as the aperture to use so I went with that.

Another thing to keep in mind is the composition, and it’s good practice to give your subject space to move into.  Which is why I kept the focus point at the left of the frame for the image above, and ensured as I panned that the subject had all that space at the right for him to run into.

Finally, the background can make or break a panning shot and keep that in mind – even though, if you do it right, it will be blurred, it should still be possible to make out shapes and form there, and you want to ensure it’s not too distracting.  Here I couldn’t avoid having some spectators in the background as they were all along the other side of the road, but hopefully they don’t detract too much from the subject.