Panning and Zooming

We were scheduled to go for a family picnic at my brother's orchard in Rawang on Saturday morning. As we were supposed to convene at the picnic area only after 10 am, I decided to spend some times to capture morning sunrise before going for the Nasi Lemak breakfast at Ali Corner with my other half. It was few minutes past seven and the condition was partially clear as the sun will only rise at 7.27am. I wanted to capture the sunrise from a good spot within BJ and decided that the main road going uphill near Jalan Kubah will be the ideal location for that.

We parked the car at Jalan Jendela and I took out my monopod and quickly set-up the camera using the 90-300mm zoom lens. Unfortunately, luck was not at our side as the rising sun was blocked by heavy cloud and made it quite impossible for me to compose a good frame. Feeling a bit down, I snapped a few photos of the horizon but could not be proud with any of them :-(( Nonetheless, I feel obliged to post the pics at least one just to convey kinda melancholy mood early Saturday morning.


With the sun still hiding behind the cloud, I decided to try out the 'pan and zoom' technique on the passing cars along Jalan Jendela and later on Persiaran Singgahsana. It took me several tries before I can adjust myself on panning and zooming at moving objects. Really, the objective of doing this is to get the auto focus mechanism to work properly and to achieve reasonable sharpness of the moving target while creating the surrounding objects blur.

Out of so many shots, the few that I posted in this blog are reasonably good at least to me as I managed to get the moving cars quite sharp while the rest were blurred hinting speed.The shots were taken from the distance of 30m to 80m utilising the 90-300mm zoom lens fully.

Honestly, I like the shot of the BMW the most as it gives the clearest picture of the car while blurred subjects creates a feeling of moving very fast, although, I think the speed of the BMW was only between 30-40 KPH going downhill.



Although the pictures only tell that I have a lot to learn on this technique, I feel a bit happier now that I finally understand what pan and zoom mean on those photographic magazines I have read!

I am also very eager to try out some shots on flowing water to create the 'angelic' feeling. Since the family picnic is to be held by the small river nearby my brother's orchard, this is an opportunity not to be missed. Thus, off we go...