For the fifth challenge we had to practice panning. Panning is a technique where your subject, in this case a dog, runs from one side to the other parallel to your camera. This technique is often used with race cars, motorbikes, dirt bikes or planes.
In order to pan, you focus on the dog and press the shutter in burst mode usually when they are close to you or directly in front of you. The tricky part is multi-fold.
1. Leaving enough space in the frame for the dog to run into. 2. Getting sharp focus on the eye that is facing you. 3. Using a slow enough shutter speed to blur the background and even the dog's paws and tail horizontally as they go by you while keeping the visible eye sharp.
Normally, for a running dog I would use 1/1200 or faster for a shutter speed. In this case I was down to 1/500s or 1/320s. This was very difficult and although I shot over a 2000 images in one night of 2 dogs, most were too blurry either due to my motion from tracking, or perhaps missed focus. Craig and Charlotte, the leaders, are tough evaluators, so eye sharpness was required.
I did manage to get a handful of images were the eye on both dogs was sharp enough. I made a decision and submitted my entry today. Check back next week to find out if I placed in the top 10.
Gallery
I had many people respond to my desperate call for dogs on short notice. I selected two, and it just so happened I have photographed them before. Little Henney I photographed in my first year and Everest I just got to know at the Paws & Portraits event a few weeks ago.
Yes, the main purpose was for me to get panning shots, but I also wanted to make it worth the family's while to travel to the beach for me, so we did many images on the beach as well. I'm thrilled with those images, of course, and I am sharing my favourites below along with some of the panning images.
Henney is the first, small dog and Everest is the much larger dog.
