One area of photography that I find challenging, yet rewarding, is doing an action pan.  To make a successful panning shot, you need to slow down your shutter speed.  However, this makes it difficult to get a sharp image because you are taking a photo of something that is moving very fast.  So what’s the best technique to do this?

Let’s start with the camera setup.  You’ll want your camera in continuous shooting mode, and trust me when I say you will capture a lot of bad images for every good one.  Next, you’ll want to switch to shutter priority.  This is Tv mode on Canon cameras or S mode on Nikon.  Set your shutter speed to something slower than you are used to.  Maybe 1/50th or 1/100th depending on what you are capturing.  Finally, you’ll want a moderate telephoto lens to make this most effective.  A 70-200mm lens would be a minimum zoom you would want.  A 300mm or 400mm lens would be better if you are trying to track wildlife at a greater distance.

Now, the key here is to practice keeping your subject in the exact same spot in your camera’s viewfinder.  Even if the subject is moving very fast (which this technique works best with), you’ll want to follow the path of the subject very closely.  When the framing matches the look you want to attain, hold down your shutter and let your camera capture a bunch of shots.  After doing this, you can usually go back and look at what you have on the camera, but typically you won’t know if you really have any keepers until later on when you look at your photos on a computer.  Let’s look at some examples.

First, here’s an example of a shot I took a couple of years back.  There was a winter X-games type of event at a local track, and it was very entertaining to watch.

Typically on a fast action shot like this, you’ll want as fast of a shutter speed as possible to freeze the motion and get a sharp frame.  1/1000 of a second, or even higher is desirable.  However, I really wanted to blur out the background and capture the feel of this racer traveling so quickly.  So I slowed down my shutter to 1/200 of a second and did my best to pan with the racer.  When you are photographing something in an environment like this where the subject will be on a single plane (racing along level ground), it’s helpful to have a monopod to help take out some of your handshake.  I mounted my camera on a Manfrotto monopod while capturing this particular event.

Here’s another more recent example at an airshow this past summer.

In this situation, a monopod isn’t going to do you any good.  The aircraft that are performing are traveling both horizontally relative to the ground as well as vertically, so you’ll need the flexibility of capturing handheld.  Here I slowed down the shutter to around 1/100 of a second.  If I could go back in time, I would have probably slowed it down a little further still, to 1/50th or 1/30th even.  That would have blurred out the car in the foreground even more.  Again, the key is you need to keep your subject in the middle of the viewfinder as you are taking photos.  This way, even though the subject is moving fast, the relative movement to your camera’s view is very slow.  That’s the only way you are going to catch a sharp image.

The other thing to keep in mind when photographing aircraft with propellers, you really want to have a slow shutter speed at all times.  If you use a high shutter speed to capture a prop-driven airplane, you’ll freeze the prop in mid-air and it will look like the airplane is falling out of the sky.  It doesn’t really turn out well at all, so keep that shutter speed down!

While it might not be too often when you’ll be in a situation where you want a shot like this, it’s not hard to practice this technique so you are ready for the real deal.  Just stand on any busy street corner and try to capture shots of cars as they drive by.  This gives you a chance to get used to tracking subjects, so the next time you are at a sporting event or out photographing wildlife, you’ll be ready.

Photography, like other art forms, rarely has a right and wrong answer when it comes to an image. What looks perfect to some people, might look horribly wrong to others. One style which has become popular enough recently to almost be considered cliche is bumping the image saturation. That saturation slider in your photo app is oh-so-tempting, nudging you on to increase the saturation just a little bit more to make those colors pop.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with boosting saturation a little. Most cameras add a built-in saturation boost when creating JPEG images. Some cameras will let you adjust how much saturation is added via in-camera photo styles. If you are shooting in RAW format you won’t get that adjustment, so you’ll want to add saturation to compensate for the occasionally bland images that the RAW format generates. (The benefit to the somewhat bland RAW start image is that you will have a more even histogram and thus better flexibility while making color and exposure adjustments, but I digress.) Many RAW images look more like the scene you remember when the colors are saturated a bit.

The problem with boosting the saturation too much is eventually you get to a point where the colors shown in your photo are no longer believable. If the grass looks more neon than foresty, you’ve gone too far. Likewise, a person’s face being flushed is another indication that the saturation was overdone.

So what can we do as photographers to produce beautiful images with crystal clear blue skies that aren’t overdone? Well, there are a couple of options. First, if you are making a landscape image, try boosting the vibrance instead of the saturation. While the saturation control boosts all the colors, the vibrance control is stronger on the green and blue parts of the spectrum, so you can increase it without blowing the reds and other colors out of proportion.

The second thing you can do is purposefully back off on the saturation bar. When I’m developing an image, I increase the saturation or vibrance to where I think the photo looks best, but then back away about 30% of the adjustment. The amount is slightly different for each image, but purposefully making this second adjustment keeps your perspective in check and ensures that your images still look realistic when you share them.

Keep in mind that (unless you are purposefully going for a surreal look) you should be trying to make your photograph match the scene you remember as closely as possible. That natural feel is what will be most appreciated by your audience in the long run.

Before I really got into photography as a hobby, I kept my camera on the green auto mode pretty much all the time.  This way, the camera can do its thing to make sure the photo turns out right…well 90% of the time.  The problem was with that extra 10% of the time:  I wanted good photos then too.  And sometimes I felt like the photos that did turn out okay could have been a little bit better.  So I started looking towards the other camera modes.

If you’re used to taking photos in the green auto mode, the next mode you’ll want to learn is the P mode.  P stands for Program auto-exposure.  It gives you some control over the settings of the camera, while taking care of most of the rest for you.  The big setting it lets you change is the ISO.

Back in the film days, the only way to change your ISO (or ASA as it was sometimes called) was to put in a different roll of film.  Film with a higher ISO number was more sensitive to light.  If you were going to take photos indoors, you used high ISO film so your shutter speed can be quick and thus avoid blurry shots.  Outside, you could use a low ISO film because there was plenty of light for a fast enough shutter speed.

So why not just use a high ISO film all the time?  Well, that extra light sensitivity comes at a cost.  As you step up the sensitivity, you add grain to the image.  This reduces sharpness and makes everything look a bit fuzzy.  If you look at an older cell phone camera shot in a dark night club, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Digital cameras are convenient because you don’t have to change the roll of film in order to pick a different ISO.  You can set the ISO separately for each photo you take.  The P mode on your camera allows you to do just that.

Typically a camera will have a native or base ISO where its sensor works the best.  On most Canon cameras, the native ISO is 100.  For Nikon, most cameras shoot natively at ISO 200.  For each doubling of the ISO, the sensor is twice as sensitive and your shutter speed can be twice as fast.  So if you are in a darker room where ISO 100 gives you a proper exposure at 1/15th of a second, bumping the ISO to 200 will give you the same exposure at 1/30th of a second.  Most of the time you want your shutter speed to be 1/60 or faster, so in this case you would bump your ISO further to ISO 400 to get the desired 1/60th of a second shutter speed.

The thing is, you can do a much better job of picking an ISO than your camera can.  If you keep your camera mode on auto, it will probably try to get the shutter speed to be around 1/60th of a second, and boost your ISO to reach that speed.  The problem comes when you are in a darker room and it starts pushing your ISO too high (ISO 3200, 6400, or even higher).  You’re going to end up with more noise in your images, and that’s not good.

Maybe you have calm nerves (have avoided caffeine for awhile, etc) and can hold your camera steady for 1/15th of a second while still getting a sharp image.  If that’s the case, then you can set your ISO in P mode until you see that your shutter speed is going to be around 1/15th of a second.  This will be a much lower ISO than if the camera was trying to reach a 1/60th of a second shutter speed.  You’re custom ISO image will turn out much cleaner.

I shot for years all the time in P mode.  When I was outside, I would set my ISO at 100 and forget about it.  When I went inside, I would start boosting my ISO, but I started to learn how high I could push the ISO before my camera would start producing too noisy of an image.  For my old compact camera, that was ISO 400.  For my first Canon 450D DSLR, I could push it to ISO 800 and still get nice images.  For my 5D Mark II, I can push around ISO 3200 or 4000 and still get solid images.

Once you know how your camera behaves at different ISOs, you can make a decision of whether you should push your ISO higher, or if you should change something else to get a better photo.  Whether that means using a flash, putting your camera on a tripod, leaning up against a wall to steady yourself, etc.  You now have that extra little bit of control.

Sometimes you have no options but to boost your ISO.  The common example of this problem is at weddings when you are in a dark reception hall.  In this situation, I would recommend raising your ISO as high as it needs to be to get a sharp image.  You’ll end up with more noise, but a grainy photo is almost always better than a blurry photo.