panning over exposed

Hi,
recently I tried to do a panning photography and the pictures would be coming out completely white and over exposed. I was shooting on TV setting with shutter opened for 0.4 seconds, I was shooting in day light. Is there something I am missing here? would like to do some panning pictures of the next upcoming rally race, here is what I am getting.

Thanks for any help

Why use 0.4 second exposure? You should be using a much more "standard" shutter speed. Its not the excessively slow shutter speed that creates the blurred background, its the fact that you have your focus point glued to a particular spot on the vehicle and nothing on earth will budge it.

So select an exposure that will not result in a white mess and concentrate on keeping that AF point exactly on a particular detail of the subject (that's the real skill with panning).

Even when I'm trying for some motion blur, I used a faster shutter speed than 0.4 sec. here: Thursday Pre-Cruise with the Kit lens.

Advice needed for Rally shooting

Depending on how fast the subject is going and your distance to the subject, try something between 1/30 and 1/60. Then set your aperture to properly expose.

Since when you're shooting cars, you have a wide range of colors, I would use an average or evaluative metering. Spot metering is going to underexpose if the car is white and overexpose if the car is black.

the real answer is probably that the aperture couldn't go small enough to expose correctly for the long shutter.


use some ND filters

drewl wrote in post #16227693
the real answer is probably that the aperture couldn't go small enough to expose correctly for the long shutter.


use some ND filters

Yeah, this ^^

At 0.4 of a second, on a sunny day (and that shot appears to have sunny patches in it) even if you are using ISO 50, your exposure would need an aperture of around f/64 to be correct. If it was an overcast day, you might be looking around f/32.

No Canon DSLR lens goes past f/32 that I am aware of, so if it was a sunny day your shot would be around two stops overexposed assuming that you were using the lens fully stopped down and the low ISO expansion activated.

If you want shots like this, you will need ND filters as suggested.

What exactly are you trying to achieve though? Are you after shots which are as blurred as the one you posted, or do you want it to be possible to see what the subject is? Shooting at 1/30th is usually going to give you a lot of blur, and 1/60th to 1/125th will give good background blur with a good chance of keeping the cars sharp. Do you really need to use 0.4 ?