Fun with panning shots

TCampbell · Aug 4, 2014

Last weekend I went to one of my favorite shooting spots and thought I'd try various panning shots.

Isolating a subject without passers-by in the shots ... and also without fauna in the way ... turned out to be trickier than I'd hoped. I'd get these fantastic periods of time in which nobody was walking through the scene... but the subjects I was waiting for decided to stop for whatever reason. And then JUST as they'd start coming my way... a pack of people would start to walk by at the same time. I had a lot of wasted shots like that.

But I did manage to scrape a few together.

I've got a car, a "bus" (drawn by horses), and a train.

by Tim Campbell1, on Flickr

tirediron · Aug 4, 2014

First time I've ever seen a panning shot of a horse-drawn wagon; nicely done Tim! Is that a narrow-gauge line?

ronlane · Aug 4, 2014

tirediron said:
First time I've ever seen a panning shot of a horse-drawn wagon; nicely done Tim! Is that a narrow-gauge line?

I agree. I saw it and thought, "blur at 2 horsepower? Must be at like a 1 sec shutter speed." I wasn't far off that. Nice job Tim.

TCampbell · Aug 4, 2014

I always leave in the EXIF data (well... I leave it in... Flickr strips it out but if you follow the link you can see it posted at their site). The shutter speed on that shot was 1/10th sec. I'm using the 70-200mm f/2.8 IS lens and while it is hand-held, it's in image stabilization mode "2" (which means stabilize the up/down but ignore the sweeping left/right motions).

The horse shot was much harder than I'd thought. There was one particular stretch of roadway which had a slight hill. The horses know this so they like to get up a bit of speed to make it up the hill. I knew that'd be a good spot to get that. But the background and foreground distractions were ruining the shot... so I opted for an alternate location -- but it's a spot where the horses are at walking speed. I think the shot would look better if they were actually running (I may re-attempt this shot at some point in the future.)

Something else I just noticed ... the car shot needs to have the white balance cooled a bit. I should have thrown these images up on my monitor side-by-side before posting to make sure the white balance agreed among the images (an easy tweak.)

Derrel · Aug 4, 2014

Good, solid shooting TCampbell! Your write-up is really great, especially your emphasis on the importance of the background, and keeping the shot free of unwanted clutter and people...really GOOD points make. i enjoyed seeing all of these photos. I'm with Tirediron on the bus shot...I have not see a photo of a horse-drawn bus since I looked through some old Library of Congress stuff; those things died out a loooong time ago!

TCampbell · Aug 4, 2014

Thanks John, Ron, and Derrel.

Incidentally John, I failed to answer your question on the track gauge. It's a standard track gauge. The image is from Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI. Henry Ford created the village to capture "Americana". All trains in the village and museum (there's also an indoor museum) were in working order when they were brought to the village and literally "drove in" on their own power.

I'd say it's "full size" but the concept is relative with trains. Inside the museum, for example, they have the Allegheny steam locomotive which was designed to pull huge coal trains over over the Appalachian mountains -- the locomotive is absolutely massive! The engine is so large that it has to have special "scissor" type drive wheels that can slide out from under the boiler so that the engine can navigate curves without straightening out the track below it.

While these engines all "drove in" under their own power, most were put on exhibit and would have needed constant maintenance to keep them in working order. Only three of the engines are in regular service.

The village railroad is adjacent to (and has cross-over switches) to the main lines where freight trains and Amtrak passenger trains still operate today. The town is moving the train station to a point just outside the village so that light-rail and Amtrak passengers can literally step off the train and into the village (the new station is expected to open by fall.) The downside is the ONLY way to arrive is to come from Chicago (Toledo is much closer but there is no spur connecting Detroit to Toledo... if we want to take the train to New York (for example), we actually have to a westbound train to Chicago, then switch to an eastbound train to take us back toward New York (meanwhile Amtrak wonders why their ridership is low.)

Years ago, the village used to have a "train week" and they'd drive working steam engines in from around the country. Unfortunately they no longer do that. (Especially tragic for me since I'm a sucker for working steam engines.)

Here's a video of Henry Ford's Baldwin 4-4-0 steam engine being pulled out of the roundhouse, onto the turntable, rotated, and moved out onto the track for some testing. This is not my video (so I won't embed it here per site policies)... but an aspect of running steam engines the public hardly ever gets to see. This engine belonged to another railroad which was purchased by Henry Ford to supply his factories in the early part of the 20th century. The engine and rolling stock were in poor condition. Ford had his employees restore the equipment to a good working condition... and this was the FIRST engine put to working service. As such, it became a favorite of Henry Ford. Remember this was before the age of air travel and even fuel stations weren't so regular as to allow cross-country car travel. When Ford had to take a long trip, he'd use this engine to pull his own private car and working office. Often Ford preferred to ride up in the cab and "drive" the train.

The engine went on display for years... and was not used for so many years that it was no longer in working condition. The museum and village undertook a project to restore the engine to working condition but it's not like you order parts for these things on the Internet. The village actually does have working blacksmiths and their own machine shop to do these things... but it takes years to restore a thing like this.

The video (again, not mine) is dated from June of 2013. I know the engine was actually restored to working service in July of 2013 (so this would have been a "test"... one of the last problems they had with it was a problem with the water injection system so I'm guessing they're rolling this out onto the track to test that.)

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYgR6RYEPO4