Sometimes I will intentionally use a slow shutter speed when I am panning a moving subject to blur the background and give a sense of motion, but that was not the case with these photos—I was shooting in aperture-priority mode and simply wasn’t paying attention to the shutter speed that the camera was giving me. In all three of these images, the shutter speed was 1/100 of a second, which is really too slow for handholding my 150-600mm zoom lens.
As the old saying goes, though, sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. I really like the way the background was rendered and am not at all bothered by the somewhat soft focus on parts of the moving heron.
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Mike Powell 
[…] via Panning a heron — Mike Powell […]
My first thought from your title was an exotic episode of a specialty-cooking show. I’m glad I was mistaken in that. I really love to see herons in flight!
“Panning” is one of those words that can have so many different meanings. I could have been criticizing the heron, cooking it, or photographing it. It is traditional to cook a big bird for Thanksgiving, but I am not sure a heron would be very appetizing. 🙂