Panning for moving subjects

There was a charity run for people dressed up in Santa outfits at our local park last Sunday. The weather was bright and cold with fairly heavy clouds meaning it was going to rain fairly soon. This provided a brief opportunity to take photographs of moving people in amongst a group of other photographers.

I was using the long end of the 18-70 mm zoom lens with Nikon D200.

For my first shots I used a shutter speed of 1/125th. At the speed they were moving, there was virtually no blurring of the background.

Nikon 18-70mm at 1/125th f/5.6

I reduced the shutter speed down to 1/80th. In these images, the grass and background trees started to blur in a relatively subdued way. Nevertheless, the hint of movement seemed to give the images more impact.

Nikoon 18-70mm at 1/80th f/6.3

At 1/60th, the background blur was more pronounced.

Nikon 18-70mm at 1/60th f/6.3

Reducing the speed further resulted in more obvious effects, but it then became pot luck whether the subject was still sharp enough to stand out from the background. A few of the shots seemed succesful however.

Nikon 18-70 mm at 1/20th f/13
I think the best image was an image of the winner of the race. I like this picture for two reasons: he is moving faster than most of the others and the motion blur is more dramatic; second, he is really kicking for the line so that his posture conveys his speed of motion also.

Nikon 18 - 70 mm at 1/30th f/13