What happens if you try to photograph a bird in flight with a shutter speed of 1/100 second? Under most circumstances, you get a really blurry image. However, if you can track your subject by panning the camera, you can freeze (or in this case, almost freeze) the action and as a bonus you get a really cool background.
It was pretty early in the morning and there was not a lot of light when I took this shot. Even though my camera was at ISO 400 and f/6.3 aperture, I knew that the shutter speed was not going to be fast enough to stop the action, given that I was in aperture-priority mode. That’s the main reason that I resorted to trying this panning technique. Getting the right speed for a pan is little hit-or-miss and I never know for sure how well it will work until I look at the results.
I’m pretty happy with this result, because I managed to capture a sense of motion in a still shot, a sense that is accentuated by the motion blur of the wings, as well as by the feeling of movement in the background.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Mike Powell 
Great shot, helps when you pan 🙂 Bif a real challenge!
I’ve read other blogs where people have tried this and it seems like the bench mark is keeping the head sharp even though everything else is somewhat blurred. It has to be very hard to do.
Fabulous. Thanks Mike.
Thanks, Garry. This is one of the fairly rare times when I try to get “creative.”
That’s a great photo. I love seeing photos of birds in flight.
Thanks. I love trying to get in-flight photos, but find it to be pretty hard. Geese are good practice for me, because they are big and fly fairly predictably.
Great panning shot Mike!
Thanks. Robyn. It’s hard to get the speed right, but it’s fun to try and looks cool when it succeeds/