112 MPH Panning

Today was a pretty fun day.  I went out to a drag strip to watch some friends race their mustangs.  This is my first experience with drag racing and it was pretty exciting.  When I was invited, I was pretty excited to try out a technique referred to as panning.  The concept of panning refers to me moving the camera to follow a moving subject, in this case the cars.  By doing this, the cars stay in focus and everything stationary blurs.  It's kind of the opposite of your normal moving photography.

Here are the three muscle cars that I was photographing today.  The red one belongs to my friend Brent.

There were a lot of horses under the hood and the red white and blue kind of lent itself to the term "American Muscle".

 This is Brent doing his burn out.  Fast shutter speed here, both for the stopped action and the bright sun that was out today.  For once, I was kind of excited to have so much sun out.  With fast cars, I was going to need a fast shutter speed.  As you'll see below, it came in handy.

As you can see with these two pictures, the panning causes the moving cars to be in focus while everything behind them blurs.  The power of these cars was amazing as you can see by them raising up as they came off the line.

So, this was a fun experience.  By far, these are the fastest things I've photographed.  I've been wanting to try out panning and I think I did pretty well for my first time.  There is another technique that I want to try out soon.  As soon as I get it done, I'll put it up here and show ya'll.

Until next time...