On safari in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park and a herd of wildebeest were running across the savanna in front of us. The wildebeest, being in large numbers, ran along a beaten track alongside our vehicle for several minutes which gave me time to experiment with some pan and blur photography.
Pan and Blur photography
With the camera balanced on a beanbag, I was able to swivel the camera/lens combination so as to follow the animals as they ran by. By slowing the shutter speed down, the background and the surrounding grasses were registered as a blur. The bodies and heads of the wildebeest remain as least identifiable whilst the legs, due to their faster movement, are more blurred. It’s an interesting technique that can be applied to moving subjects in the urban environment as well. The results are not terribly predictable and so it’s necessary to take numerous frames in the hope of getting something worthwhile, but with digital, pixels are cheap and there’s no problem in simply deleting images that don’t work.
Processed in Adobe Lightroom. Original file underexposed, required +1.5 stops.