How do I take a motion shot with the background blurred?

[Tyre Smoke]

Sorry for the probably simple question, but how do you take a picture of say, a Le Mans car at full chat with the car in perfect focus and the background all nicely blurred?

[MartinP]

The technique is called panning. You track the car through the viewfinder and fire the shutter while the camera is still moving. It takes a bit of practice to get right and to get a feel for what shutter speed to use.

If you google 'panning' you should find lots of 'how to' tutorials online.

[Tyre Smoke]

Thanks Martin.

Next question, vignetting? What's that then?

[shalmaneser]

it's generally done in post production nowadays. just type it into youtube, can be done on Paintshop Pro or Gimp or any number of post production suites.

[Tyre Smoke]

Thank you. Very kind.

I'll be along later with some more questions no doubt!

[mattdaniels]

Tyre Smoke said:

Thanks Martin.

Next question, vignetting? What's that then?

It's a distortion of the image around the edges which makes it less bright around the outside compared to the middle (ie. the image "fades" from the centre outwards). It's a common fault in cheap / low quality lenses. It's also an effect that you can deliberately apply to images in post-processing in order to be "arty".

[abarth500]

As Martin said, panning does take some time to get used to, it's good to get some practice in before the event. Try and borrow a friend and pop up to a disused location (industrial estate in the evening?) to get some practice in?

Here's a few non-motorsport panning shot as an example:

Shot at 1/40th hand-held:



Shot at 1/80th hand-held:



And a few motorsport shots.

Shot at 1/20th hand-held:



That shot is pushing the limits of hand-held-slow-shutter-speed, and not the best result.

Shot at 1/40th hand-held



A reasonable shutter speed once you get to grips with panning. You could use a monopod, but I find mine very restrictive.

Shot at 1/50th hand-held



All the above were either shot with the 70-200 or 100-400

Shot at 1/160th hand-held



That was shot with the 17-40, it all depends how close you can get to the action though.

[flat-planedCrank]

Think its fair to say that vignetting can effect many lenses in some way - fast prime lenses especially.
Even lenses costing ££££'s can exhibit vignetting.

Lots of info & background on wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignetting

[Adz The Rat]

This is helpful, Ive never done a panning shot and want to get it perfected.

[anonymous-user]

Great thread, interesting stuff.

Off to play with my SLR that usually just sits on auto.

[DIW35]

Adz The Rat said:

This is helpful, Ive never done a panning shot and want to get it perfected.

Don't even need a mate to help you practice - just pop along to the nearest fast A road or dual carriageway. Plenty of cars to practice on there.

[ezakimak]

did a little camera course at lunch time at work yesterday, was a free bee with the new body so why not.

one little thing that we did was practice panning holding the camera with the right hand and holding the left hand out in front of the lense. follow your hand and try the different shutter speeds.

Could be a good little exercise to do in between cars at the track to check that you are going to get the required amount of motion blur in the background.

Ryan

[Tyre Smoke]

^^^^^^^^^

Like this!

Good tip for Le Mans.

[david_b]

Tyre Smoke said:

Sorry for the probably simple question, but how do you take a picture of say, a Le Mans car at full chat with the car in perfect focus and the background all nicely blurred?

Apart from the general advice about panning that's already been given, it's worth bearing in mind that Le Mans isn't the easiest place at which to photograph. Particularly in the areas before and after the start/finish straight, there are big fences pretty much everywhere, and the track can be quite a long way away. The cars are also going quite fast in comparison to cars driving in a car park etc which has quite a big influence on your likelihood of getting good shots!

There are spots here and there, and it's well worth utilising the extra access you can get (grandstands etc) during the practise sessions on Thursday. It's also a bloody huge circuit, so it's not quite the same as somewhere like Brands where you can easily move on to another corner if you decide you want a better spot

Some of my efforts from last year are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidbreach/sets/7215...

Couple of examples, all handheld (don't like mono/tripods):


Le Mans 24 hours 2010 by david_b, on Flickr
(1/80sec)


Le Mans 24 hours 2010 by david_b, on Flickr
(1/10sec)


Le Mans 24 hours 2010 by david_b, on Flickr
(1/10sec)


Le Mans 24 hours 2010 by david_b, on Flickr
(1/80sec)

[SWH]

Having grown up with 24 or 26 shots on Kodak's finest, and no real idea if they'd worked, you eventually perfect panning with the car.... with a digital camera you can just keep playing. By no means an expert at all here, but my 2p's worth would be to get yourself down to a hillclimb or sprint (or a circuit of course!) and take a photo of everything that goes past, everything, and just see what works.

A quick look at a Goodwood FoS folder turned up this, taken with my humble Sony Cybershot:

[ezakimak]

Guys I’m struggling with the shutter speed settings at the moment. I was previously using an old Nikon D70, which was fine as all I had to do was scroll the rear thumb wheel all the way to Bulb and i could then work out which end of the range I was in.

A couple of weeks ago i upgraded the body to a D7000 and now have to learn to use it all over again. When its in the shutter priority mode (TV on cannon I think) the bulb indicator does not come up, what’s worse is that it will go from a 30 second exposure to a really short one or vice verse with one scroll of the rear thumb wheel as the setting loops around, so I’m constantly loosing track of where I’m at.

Anyone got any tips for changing the settings so that it doesn’t go from one extreme to the next, or care to explain how to interpret the numbers on the shutter release indicator screen. I’m ok with the whole seconds ones as they have “ next to them but once I get below that I don’t know how to work out if its at 1/10th – 1/80th or 1/250th of a second.

If I can’t work it out I think my hand trick will get me through, just lots to sort out and learn, it’s the little things that seem to slow me up.
PS on the 7000 the bulb indicator will come up when in full manual mode.


thanks again lads.
regards Ryan

[mattdaniels]

Sounds a bit weird. Have you read the manual? It sounds like the camera is in aperture priority mode rather than shutter priority mode and it's deciding what shutter speed to select as you change the aperture.

I've not used a D7000 but I have a D40x and D700 - if it's anything like those then when it's in shutter priority mode and you scroll the wheel to the left the shutter speed gets slower, when you scroll to the right it gets faster. If the shutter speed is 1 second or slower, it's shown with a quote mark after it (eg. 1")

[SamHH]

ezakimak said:

Anyone got any tips for changing the settings so that it doesn’t go from one extreme to the next, or care to explain how to interpret the numbers on the shutter release indicator screen. I’m ok with the whole seconds ones as they have “ next to them but once I get below that I don’t know how to work out if its at 1/10th – 1/80th or 1/250th of a second.

If you know when you have selected a shutter speed of whole seconds by the presence of the seconds symbol, then can't you tell that you've selected fractions of a second by the absence of the seconds symbol? I.e. if the display in the viewfinder, the display on the top of the camera or the display on the rear of the camera says '10"', you know it's ten seconds; if it says '10', you know it's one tenth of a second.

[AndWhyNot]

ezakimak said:

Anyone got any tips for changing the settings so that it doesn’t go from one extreme to the next, or care to explain how to interpret the numbers on the shutter release indicator screen.

Image from ePhotozine


The button under the Menu button on the left hand side, with the question mark and key symbol. Try pressing that when the camera's in standby- on my D300 that takes you into a mode that brings all the settings onto the rear LCD screen. You can then scroll the wheel and watch the numbers get bigger and smaller. You'll probably find that scrolling to the right is faster and scrolling to the left is slower.

There are very few shutter speeds slower than 1" and, again on the D300, they all display with the second marker ("). It'll sink in after a couple of attempts.