It started with panning. Panning is the technique where you track the subject as it moves, and with a slow enough shutter speed, you get a sharp subject and a blurred background. This technique is great for showing movement, bringing a bit more energy into the image.

Let’s back up a bit though – what is ‘it’?

This year, as well as juggling my final year of university, I’ve been pushing myself to try new things photographically. At the start of the year I brainstormed all the things that I usually do when I photograph. You know, fast shutter speeds to freeze action, wide apertures and high ISO to work in low light. Using a telephoto to get close to my subjects. Then I made a list of all the opposites of those things, and I’ve been working on trying them out. So that is ‘it’.

It’s difficult to try new things and change your photographic practice. It can be frustrating, and often times it feels like I’m missing out on opportunities that would otherwise yield good photos. The truth is, they’d just be ‘good photos’ like all my other ‘good photos’, and I wouldn’t learn anything new. 

So back to panning – slower shutter speeds than I usually use, anywhere in the vicinity of 1/60sec and slower. It’s quite difficult to master, and it takes a lot of practice to synch up your panning speed with that of your subject. But the results it yields are so much more dynamic than split-second images, and I fell in love with the process.

While we were in South Africa, I worked my way up from ambling Zebra to cantering Red Hartebeest. I worked my way down to slower and slower shutter speeds as well, seeing how far I could push it before the image became a blurry, indistinct mess.

Eventually the results made me think of Impressionism. The Impressionist painters used thousands of tiny brush-strokes to capture the changing qualities of light, its dynamic fluctuations over time. Impressionism was about movement. We don’t see the world as a static set of images, it moves all the time, and we track these movements with our eyes. So in a way, freeze-frame images are not quite what we perceive. Impressionist photography does the same thing, bringing the movement back into a static image.

Fast-flying birds are somewhat harder! I visited Muriwai the other day, and the winds were as wild as ever. In the end, the photo I liked the most had lost almost all of its sharpness on the main subject, but the movement of the wings drew me to it. The background of the colony does get a bit lost though, so I’m definitely going to return and try it out again.

Panning is just one way of experimenting with impressionism in wildlife photography, and I’ll try and explore different techniques in future blogs. Panning is something you can’t really be told how to do much beyond the basic principle. To get it, and get better at it, you have to practice. So go out and give it a try, especially if you haven’t done so before. It’s extremely rewarding, and though the resulting images may not be everyone’s cup of tea, I think they have an energy to them that frozen action shots are often missing.

In order, the shutter speeds for each of these images were: 1/10sec, 1/2sec, 1/20sec, 1.6sec, 1/60sec, 1/25sec.