Panning and white balance.

My youngest daughter, Chelsea, was home on leave from the Marines and wanted me to teach her how to ride a motorcycle. During the lesson my Wife comes running out of the house with my Nikon D40 and yells at me for not taking pictures. As a dutiful husband and dad I take the camera and start snapping away. Then I decided to try some panning shots so I turned the D40 to Shutter priority and set the shutter to 1/40th of a second. The camera decided to use f/13 (it's not set for full stops) and I shot away. I did manage to get a few good ones. Here she's going about 10 miles per hour, but it looks much faster because of the slow shutter.

Panning is just following the subject through your view finder, pressing the shutter half way to focus lock on it and shooting. Your camera has to keep following the subject as it moves or it won't work.



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A few days later I read on Ken Rockwell's site about white balance and how he uses the cloudy setting even in sunlight for it's amber, warming effect. It was early morning in Albuquerque and my 50mm lens was on my D300 body so I opened the front door, set my white balance to sun and here's what I got.



Changing the setting to cloudy I snapped again and here's what came out.



I have to admit, I like Rockwell's way better and keep my WB setting on cloudy most of the time now.