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This weekend was the second of the MNMBS events. My first for the season. Beautiful sunny day, a nice cool breeze, an afternoon downpour, and no Manhandler. All firsts for Afton that I can remember. Its usually quite the scorcher, add to that a screaming climb followed by a jaunt across a shadeless mountain top makes for quite the course. To my surprise, once a race started, there really wasn't a gap between riders to make it to my next photo spot. With the class sizes getting larger and certain climbs removed there was a pretty consistent flow of racers moving across the course at any given time. I found myself in pretty nondescript locations on the trail, not much going on to give it that extreme look I hope to capture, therefore Afton became a Panning day.

Panning is a technique used to capture an object in motion, which successfully shows that object in motion. So how do you create a panning photo.

First find the right location. The riders should be moving in a fairly smooth and fast pace. Downhills work well. If you choose a rock garden , you can still pan it will just be more challenging with the riders head bouncing in numerous directions. Also, your location should not have direct light behind the riders. Again, you can successfully get a pan image but I've found that I lose parts of peoples faces to bright spaces between trees,etc.

Next set up your camera. Slow your shutter speed enough to create blurry photographs : ) I know we have all gotten them from time to time without trying, so that should be easy to do. Its basically trial and error until you figure out the right speed. If you cant get the focal point in focus then you need to increase your shutter speed. If its all too crisp then drop it down. I use 1/40 to 1/50 for sport riders and 1/50 to 1/60 for Elite Riders.

The trick to panning photos is to capture the rider in focus, while the background blurs or pans. This requires a nice shot of light to freeze them. If you have a flash, set it up for rear curtain sync. This allows the flash to fire at the end of the exposure vs at the beginning. Any object struck by your flash should appear frozen or crisp within the photo.

Now that we have our shutter speed and lighting figured out, the last step is to take the photo. This is also tricky and requires some practice. You actually need to move while taking the photograph, this is key. By movement I mean slight movement, as simple as turning at the hips to stay facing the racer. As a racer approaches lock your focal point on their face (or whatever you would like in focus). Then smoothly move with them to keep the focus point in the same place as you click the shutter. As long as you stayed on the focal point and didn't have any crazy obstructing light from the other side you may have just created a successful panning image.

Well hopefully that makes sense : ) and good luck with the panning images.


This above image was my original intent for lap 1 or 2 of the Elite/Comp race. However many were unable to ride the obstacle. Below are the panning images that followed.


Going from one location to the next I ran into this cute little guy.

In the three photos above, the first photo was set for proper exposure, and as the looming storm rolled in the forest became nice and dark.

Below are a few from the Sport Class Field as well.

I even ran into this little guy out on the golf course so he got a panning photo as well : )