Digital Focus: Shoot Moving Subjects With Ease

Take real action shots by panning the right way.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Capturing Motion Blur

Photography involves a contradiction: Our lives are in constant motion, but photographs offer only freeze frames. Sometimes pictures are supposed to be static; often we'd like them to reveal something of the action that was taking place when we pressed the shutter release. In past newsletters, I've told you how to add a sense of motion to your photos using filters in your computer's image editing program: See Digital Focus: Add Motion to Your Photos and Digital Focus: More Tricks for Putting Motion in Photos.

Panning for Motion Blur

This week let's talk about capturing motion directly with your digital camera, using a technique called panning. Panning lets you capture your subject in sharp focus while turning the background into a blur of motion. What's it look like? Check out a picture I took at a fair several years ago.

So how do you pan? In a nutshell, you need to twist your body in sync with the motion of the subject as you press the shutter release. Position yourself in a spot where you can easily follow the moving subject without having the camera's line of sight blocked. Also, consider this: The closer you are to the subject, the faster you'll have to pan. That means you'll get a blurrier background, but it'll be harder to keep the subject sharp.

If your digital camera lets you adjust the shutter speed--using a shutter priority or manual exposure mode--set it for about 1/60 second. If you can't assign the shutter speed, be sure not to put the camera in a mode where it will try to use the very fastest speed available, as it would in its "action" mode.

Anchor your feet, then pivot your whole body with the motion of the subject as you track it through the camera's viewfinder or on the LCD. (Using the display lets you stabilize the camera by bracing your elbows against the sides of your chest while smoothly following the subject.) Press the shutter release and continue tracking the subject until you know that the shutter has closed.

Follow-through is important in sports, and it's important in action photography: You need to continue to pan with your subject even after the shutter releases. This ensures that you won't stop panning in the middle of the exposure. Also, you'll get your best pictures when you can pan at the right speed to keep the subject centered in the frame throughout the entire exposure, and that takes a little practice. You may need to try panning a few times to get the shot right.

Motion Without Panning

There's another way to show action in your photos: You can hold the camera rigidly in place and let the action scream through the viewfinder as you take the picture, capturing the subject's motion, not the background's. If you're shooting in broad daylight with a reasonably fast shutter speed, you can probably hold the camera for this kind of shot. If you're shooting with a slow shutter speed in a dark location, though, I recommend mounting the camera on a tripod. For example, I photographed a moving subway car in a New York subway station. I took the picture at about 1/15 second, while bracing myself against the wall of the subway--I didn't have a tripod available.

Dave's Favorites: Make Virtual Reality Movies With Ulead Cool 360

There's a lot of interest in panoramas these days. Using software to stitch a series of photos together, you can create impressive wide-format images. But an even cooler use for your panorama might be making a virtual-reality movie. Using Apple's QuickTime format to stitch photos together, you can create your own little virtual world.

There are a few applications available for making QuickTime VR movies, but most of them--like Apple QuickTime Virtual Reality Authoring Software and RealViz Stitcher--run about $500. Thankfully, there's an affordable alternative out there: Ulead's Cool 360, which costs just $40.

Cool 360 is amazingly easy to use. Just select a batch of photos, and the program automatically arranges them with the appropriate overlap. Then save the finished project as a QuickTime file--which plays in any copy of QuickTime 3 or higher--or as a virtual reality movie compatible with Ulead's own player.

You can use Cool 360 to create a custom Web page for your VR movie, e-mail it, or create a screen saver. You can also tweak settings like hue, saturation, contrast, and brightness. Those options don't diminish the program's ease of use, though. If you take 360-degrees worth of photos on your digital camera, you can have a working QuickTime VR video of the panorama minutes after copying the images to your PC. It's a must-have for anyone who wants new ways to experiment with their photos.

Q&A: Why are My Pictures So Grainy?

I recently bought my first digital camera and it seems that about half of my pictures are terribly grainy, almost like they've been blown up from a smaller print. What am I doing wrong? If I had to guess, I'd say that all the "problem" shots are taken from a distance, while most of the close-in photos look good.

--Mary Woosley, Austin, Texas

Since it's the far-away shots that are giving you trouble, Mary, I'd guess that it's the fault of your digital zoom. Your camera has two zoom modes: an optical zoom that uses optics to enlarge your photo and a digital zoom that goes beyond the optical zoom's range to magnify your picture by just cropping away picture information and then enlarging what's left. Digital zooms are gimmicks that beef up the spec on the box but rarely result in a good picture.

My advice is to avoid using your digital zoom: Turn it off completely in the camera's preferences, if you have such an option. Stick with your camera's optical zoom range and you'll get far better pictures.

Hot Pics

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "For Your Eyes Only," by Michael Kaplan, Richmond Hill, Ontario

Michael says: "This is from a recent cabaret show for charity. The dancer is stopped in motion under a spotlight with smoke for effect. It was during a dance number titled "For Your Eyes Only," from the James Bond film.

Hot Pic of the Month: Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For July, we chose Judith Secco's sublime portrait of pears.

Congratulations to Judith, and to everyone that won the Hot Pic of the Week this month. Keep those entries coming!

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

For back issues, visit our Digital Photo Tips archive. Sign up to have the Digital Focus Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.