Panning

I've read about this technique on the pages of Bjørn Rørslett first (his pages are a great resource for Nikon users because of his wonderful camera and especially lens reviews), I think it was on this page. Only later I found out that "traditional" panning means that you move the camera to follow an object in motion and use a slow shutter speed to blur the background while keeping the main subject in focus. :-)

I find panning an interesting technique (among others) to reduce an image to its colours and shapes, and actually, I found out that I have an "original" and a panned version of an image to illustrate the effect here. :-)

Normal photo:

Nikon D70s @ ISO200, 1/15s with AF-S DX VR Nikkor 18-200 @ 130mm, f/8

Panned version:

Nikon D70s @ ISO200, 1/20s with AF-S DX VR Nikkor 18-200 @ 130mm, f/8

Well, its not the same view and both images have been post processed to carve out their individual quality. Surprisingly, the normal version has an even longer exposure time which was possible only because of the lens' VR mechanism (Canon calls it "IS", other abbreviations of the same thing include "OS", "SR", and whatnot). In the second shot, I simply moved the camera up and down and released the shutter (it took a couple of tries until I got the image that I wanted, of course).