Xmas & New Year Holiday Season 2012

This time around the Xmas and New Year's holidays season, I got some time and opportunity to exercise my favorite thing i.e. taking photos.

A friend visited us from Victoria and that was the ideal for me to show off my new DSLR and skills :P We went to only a few places like Manly Beach, Darling Harbor & Watsons Bay but managed to take few photos worth sharing here.

I am going to add them below. Feel free to leave a comment/feedback (if you happen to crash on this blog).

I took this photo at Manly beach. This was some type of a cone on a tree and I liked how it looked. Quickly took this shot while there were people behind me coming down the narrow track.

 This was at Watsons Bay when it started to rain and we were waiting inside the cars for it to slow down so that we can setup our BBQ in the shed in the park. I took this shot of the rain drop on the car's window. You can see the reflection of the building across the street in it.













Taken at Manly Beach as well.

 This was at the Manly Beach as well. Kept it out of focus for the added affect of the lights. Love it.

These little fountains are like brand-ambassador for the Manly Beach. When you see these, you know it was the Manly beach :P



















Overall had good fun with friends during the Xmas & NY break. Good food, lots of driving (mainly around Sydney) and lots of fun. It was a good holiday (but never enough) :(

Anyway, happy new year to everyone !!

Learning Panning Photography

Panning is a photography technique in which the objective is to capture a photo of a moving object while capturing the speed as well i.e. the resulting photo will also show the fact that the object was a moving object.

In the last post, Learning the Shutter Value, I have noted that how you can control the speed of a moving object using different shutter values. We touched base with how a fast shutter can freeze a moving object as well. Panning, although is related but, altogether a different concept as mentioned above. In panning you work on 2 objectives; 1st is to capture a sharper image of the moving object and 2nd is to also capture the speed of the moving object.

Panning is done by moving the camera along with the moving object to shoot. This can produce amazing results depending on how skillful you are at this technique. Using panning technique, the main object comes out sharp while the background gets blurry effect evidencing the movement of the object. This requires a lot of practice and patience along with good handling of the camera such as it should not shake vertically while you are panning horizontally along with the moving object. You should 'pan' the camera at least at the same speed as the moving object i.e. along with the movement.

I am new and learning this technique myself. Last week I have tried it for the first time and here are a couple of photos that I can share here (i.e. that came out better than others :P)

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I took this shot near Bondi beach while standing at the road side where our car was parked. I quite like this one as this was a curvy road (wasn't straight which is recommended for a better panning shot).

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This shot was taken from the back seat of a moving car and the bike was crossing the car on the left side. This may not be called as "Panning" (i'm not sure) but still this does blur the background slightly while the image is comparatively sharper.
Nevertheless I still like it :)

As I said I am a photography enthusiast, student myself and this is my first ever attempt at this technique, therefore I don't claim whatever I wrote above is 100% true but I know some of it is valid. I am recording this for my own learning and will be adding more as I learn more.

Here is a blog-post "Mastering Panning - Photographing Moving Subjects" where from I have learnt some about this technique. I hope you can also learn some and please do share / leave a comment on the post if you have benefit from it.


Happy Panning !!!

Happy Learning !!!