City - Near Litang State - SICHUAN Country - China
About
I'm currently in the remote western part of Sichuan, near the Tibet-Sichuan boundary, and an area which is more Tibetan than Chinese. Saimahui is Mandarin for a type of horse festival and I was lucky enough to be one of only three foreigners to see this small festival a few days ago. The horsemen do some acrobatics on horses, shoot arrows at targets and race around a bit.
This is the first trip in which I'm using my new zoom lens, and while its great for some things, its not quite good/fast enough to achieve what I wanted here and that was to freeze the rider and horse, while blurring the rest of the photo, using a panning motion. I had some success but not quite enough. Could be that I just need to make more attempts at doing this, since it's not easy to do, especially the first time out.
If anyone has any ideas on how I can improve on this technique, please be good enough to share your thoughts.
Wow James!....It has been a while since seeing your images. This one is very successful in my mind but obviously it was not what you intended. Just the same i like it a lot, the energy is conveyed exceptionally well.
philip, one thing that would have improved this photo now that i look back on it is if the two people directly behind the horse werent there. the legs of the horse would be more clearly defined, but those are decisions i need to make earlier and faster. as for shutter speed and so on, its just something i have to work on. may go out and shoot photos of moving taxis here in chengdu later today.
thank you for your splendid comment wez. i wasnt aware of the rule of thumb you mentioned above, was just going by some information i received on a post i made in one of the forums awhile back. it seems that i need more focus indeed. and more practice.
you can be foreigner number 2 on the next trip if you wish, one that could be made via bicycle in 2007.
Wonderful feeling of motion in this one James, youve panned wonderfully.
With regard to freezing the object that you are shooting, dont forget the rule that evry 1mm of focal length should equal /1 of a second, so for example, if you were shooting at a focal length of 150mm, your slowest shutter speed available should be around 1/150 sec to keep the object nice and sharp. This is only a guideline obviously.
The panning action itself will create the blurred background, it just takes some practice to be able to anticipate where your object is gonna be in the frame at the time you press the shutter. Many people switch to manual focus, and prefocus onto a spot where they know the object is going to pass. Easy is something like a circuit race where the objects are going round and round, not so easy to judge is something like a horse show i would guess, where the movement is much more random.
Anyway, great image eiither way. Wish i had been foerigner number 4!!!
Looks to me like it came out very well, great sense of motion. There is probably a limit to what you can do since you would need a faster shutter speed to stop the motion in the horse's legs but that would also clarify the background. A slower speed to blur the background more would blur any part of the subject which was in relative motion to another part.
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{K:14339} 8/2/2006