faffing around on the bike

When you see an overly faffed image, it’s fair bet it’s hiding something.

Out this morning to give Anniemay’s new bike a run and check the setup.  I couldn’t keep up - she was freewheeling quicker than I could pedal.

I decided to try a panning shot - something I’ve not done since my film days.  I went back to basics and decided to do everything on manual settings.  My compact fortunately has manual focus (and a really cool depth of field preview) and manual exposure settings.

Manual focus was surprisingly easy - just focussed on a point in the centre of the road and a small aperture gave me enough depth of field.

However …. there are two things that can go wrong - and they did.  The first is a consequence of doing this on a sunny day with a compact camera.  Panning wisdom suggests starting with a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second (and then drop to 1/15th or go up to 1/60th - depending on how it pans out - sorry).  A 1/30th should keep the subject sharp but allow the background to blur as the camera pans round.

My compact (like many others) doesn’t have a particularly small minimum aperture - f9 in my case.  So with the lowest ISO and 1/30th second shutter speed the camera wanted an aperture of at least f22.  Which is doesn’t have.  Another thing it doesn’t have is a built in ND filter.  So each shot was over-exposed.  

The second thing that can mess all this up is panning technique.  Mine turned out to be rubbish.  I need lots more practice.  On another day though - there were only so many times I could send AM back up the road while I tried again.

In the end I faffed around with the editing software to hide my poor technique and over exposure.  Anniemay, on the other hand did a better job of me, than I did of her.  Sorry if that sounds a bit over-technical.  It’s been that sort of day.