The key point here is you need a slow shutter speed to capture
that blurry background movement. It’s a balance – too fast and
the leopard won’t have moved far enough to give you any streaky
background; too slow and it’ll be impossible to accurately track
the leopard the whole time, resulting in it coming out a bit
blurry. It depends how fast your subject’s moving, and how long
your lens is. You’ll get a feel for it, but a good starting point for
birds and animals with a telephoto lens could be about 1/30s.
So switch to Tv mode (S mode for non-Canons) and dial your
shutter speed down to 1/30s. Again, set your ISO to ‘Auto’ so that it’ll
do whatever it has to do to give you that shutter speed irrespective of
lighting conditions (it’ll usually pick the lowest, ISO 100 - or even
ISO 50 if you can enable that in your camera’s Custom Functions).
Again, set your focus-mode to ‘AI Servo’ (aka ‘AF-C’) so it’ll track
focus on the moving subject, and again, perhaps enable more than
just one centre AF point (so you don’t have to be so pedantic about
making sure you don’t accidentally slip the one focus point off the
subject as you track it). Similarly again, set your camera’s ‘drive
mode’ to continuous so you can just hold the button down and
rattle off a whole series of photos, concentrating on trying to pan
smoothly. Hopefully you will have managed to do just that on at
least one of the shots. Smooth panning does take a little practice,
but it’s not really as hard as you might think it looks.
Panning Mode Tip: Because you’re asking for such a slow photo,
you may well find - especially in bright light during the middle of
the day when using a very slow shutter speed like 1/10s or longer- that the camera can’t help but over-expose the photo. To the
untrained eye, you’ll likely notice that your photos are coming
out inexplicably bright. If you’re observant though, you’d have
also noticed that when looking through the viewfinder before you
took the shot that the ‘f ’ number it was automatically trying to
use (likely the largest possible) was f lashing, or was even replaced
with the words ‘hi’ or ‘low’ on some brands. This is warning you
that the camera can’t stop the lens down enough to give you such
a slow photo without overexposing. Then you’ll just have to scroll
up your shutter speed up a bit faster until it can cope. Don’t try
to solve the issue by dialling down your exposure compensation
to make the photo darker – that won’t help. Accept that you’re
going to have to use a higher shutter speed and get less streaky
movement in the background. On the up side, it’ll be easier to
keep the subject sharp as you don’t have to track it for as long!
‘Car/Helicopter Mode’
Photographing from a ‘doors-off ’ plane or helicopter is not
only incredibly exciting, but that aerial perspective can
produce amazing photos, proving you have the right settings.AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY + DIGITAL JULY 2015 AUSTRALIANPHOTOGRAPHY.COM 61
“Panning is a great way to capture a
feeling of movement in an image and
a great technique to embrace when
the light is fading in the evening...”
LEFT
Panning with a slow
shutter speed can
create a great sense
of movement, as in
this distant leopard
running across a
dry river in Kenya.
Here I simply
ratcheted up the
‘f’ number (closing
the aperture down)
to give me a slow
shutter speed for
a basic panning
shot, but ‘panning
mode’ would
have provided me
better settings
(with a lower ISO,
continuous drive
mode, tracking
AF, etc) and more
quickly. I keep it
saved in my ‘custom
modes’ now.
Canon EOS-1D X,
200-400mm lens
+ 2x extender @
800mm, in-built
1.4x extender not
engaged, 1/100s
@ f/29, ISO 3200,
handheld. Curves,
levels, cropping,
vignetting and
noise-reduction
adjustment in
Lightroom CC.HOW TO Use Custom Modes