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Courier go “zoom”, photographer go “pan” (Pic: Stephen Dowling)
The pan is one of the simplest photography techniques. Mastering it is one of the quickest ways to elevate your photography.
Rather than keeping the camera still as a moving subject sweeps by, you keep the subject firmly in your view as it moves past. That way you're rendering the background as a blur, and keeping your subjects still and sharp. Simple, right?
Mastering it is the clincher. I can think of plenty of times I've snapped something zooming past me at speed – either from the side of the road or out the window of a train – and then remembered that I wasn't panning. It's the simple repeated mistakes that will annoy you.
On this day, at least, I remembered the pan before I clicked the shutter.
This was taken back in January, on a cold, wet winter's day. I was doing one of my usual weekday routines – snapping off half a roll of film on a commute into the office. I've realised that getting one train earlier gives me 45 minutes to wander my way slowly through central London; it's a good way to keep on top of testing cameras for Cameraburo.
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This being cold, grey, wintery London, I'd loaded Ilford Photo XP2 Super into a Canon Sure Shot 76 Zoom. XP2 Super is the last chromogenic black-and-white film on the market – the pictures you get are true black-and-white, but the film is processed in C41 chemicals for colour film. That means you can drop it in to your local minilab along with your colour films. It's become my go-to film for winter. (The ISO 400 rating certainly helps with UK winter weather too.)
The Canon Sure Shot 76 Zoom is one of the vast Sure Shot range of compact cameras Canon churned out from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s. It's the kind of camera I would have walked past with barely a glance a decade ago, but very much the kind of camera that flies off the Cameraburo shelves.
And there's a reason they fly off the shelves: simple to use, just enough creative control to feel like you're taking a photograph and not just jabbing at a button, a decent lens that doesn't zoom too far. It's a bit of a quiet classic that deserves a lot more attention.
And, crucially, the Sure Shot 76 Zoom is the kind of camera that you will fit in your jacket pocket, allowing you to snap spur-of-the-moment shots like this on your way to work. Whether you remember to pan, however, is all down to you.