Hi Christina, Ted, Lex and Andre
Firstly, apologies for starting a thread that has caused sleepless nights and mathematics:)
Ted,
As you have shown so well mathematics can demonstrate and assist in understanding exactly what is happening and why. Your effort has to be commended and I have very much appreciated reading this.
Andre,
Nice capture but I would question if it is in fact 'all' in focus. If I had looked at this image prior to this thread subject I would have not really taken any account that parts are less sharp than others and if I did I would have immediately thought DoF. As I look at it now I ask myself 'is it all in focus but some parts suffering from motion blur more than other parts'?
Lex,
As you point out there are many variables to consider.
Christina,
I have undertaken a bit more investigation on panning and found a very good article by John Jovic of Photo Cornucopia at
http://photocornucopia.com/1042.html and whilst in reference to cars has some interesting information on panning.
He also gives a 'starting point' for selecting shutter speed which is if the speed is known in kph convert it to mph and use that as the shutter speed. Example if the car is going at 60kph (40 mile per hour) then shoot at approx 1/40th of a second. On this basis as a starting point I would suspect a higher speed is required due to a horse having more out of direction parts flying around that need to be frozen with a higher SS.
Andre has given one example of setting up for your shots so out of interest this is what I did for the cars;
Focus mode in AF-C (continuous) with Dynamic 9 point selected.
For exposure my shutter speed was my priority so I set up in manual with auto ISO. I focused/metered on a point (the road) where I would be shooting and then adjusted my aperture so that the ISO just went above base value, in other words auto ISO would function nearer to rather than farther from base value.
Shooting conditions were between slight cloud to brilliant sun with the sun to left and front of me, not best but for just about every shot any highlights on bright shiny surfaces were just about totally eliminated with around up to 25% recovery only in ACR.
I did find that for using wide apertures and I only went to f4.5 I did have to use either a CPL or on the second day my ND filter to achieve the speeds I required.
Grahame