What's a pan shot?
A pan shot is where the subject is sharply focused but the background is blurred. Here's an example:
Canon EOS-20D, 24-70 lens, 1/80 sec
Why pan?
Pan shots are useful for conveying a sense of movement for anything that moves at a walking pace or quicker. They work well for cars as these are objects that move quickly in a straight line, but you can also pan people walking, cyclists, animals...anything. They are also useful for photographing moving objects in low light where you wouldn't be able to get a fast shutter speed. You can pan at 5 or 500kmph, and from 1 to 1000m away from the subject.
How to pan
Practice is the key. Find yourself a nice straight bit of road where the cars will be going between 60 and 100kmph, and stand back from the road by around 30-50m. As a car approaches, say from the left, aim the camera at it and track the car as it passes directly in front of you and then moves away down the road. Do this a few times.
Now you're ready to try and take some shots.
Setup
Put your camera on its fastest motor drive, and use a servo mode if you have it -- that's a method of focusing that constantly changes focus as your subject moves. If you have no motor drive nor a servo mode you can still pull off a pan shot, it's just more difficult. I'll describe that later.
Work out what zoom you want. Don't try and zoom in so the car almost completely fills the frame, because as you pan you'll almost certainly get some car out of the frame. Zooming out a little gives you some margin for error, and you can crop to suit later on. Having a car stop on the road directly in front of you helps.
Set your camera to centre-point focus.
For your first attempts use a shutter speed of 1/100 sec in shutter-priority mode.
The pan
Adopt your favoured, most stable stance. Pick the subject car up through the viewfinder as early as you can; you need to be tracking it well before it is directly in front of you.
As the car starts to pass by you should by now be smoothly tracking it with the camera. Now, while doing that, press the shutter button and hold it down while continuing to smoothly track. Follow the car through until it has gone out of sight even if the camera's buffer fills up.
Review
Have a look at your shots. You'll probably need to work on your technique but you should see some keepers fairly quickly. The quicker the shutter speed, the sharper the subject, but the less the background blur.
Image stabilisation
In general keep it on. If you have a two-mode Canon lens select mode 2.
How to cope without servo or motor drive
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Short-lens panning
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D3 image notes: the car is silver, so it is important to select a dark background to avoid the car being lost in the background. The dust also provides some sense of movement. Alloy wheels, with their large spokes, work much better than steel wheels. On this occasion we did two runs as time was pressing, but usually I'd have the driver do at least four to make sure of a variety of shots such as a 3/4 pan shot, and at different shutter speeds.
There is a lot more to say about pan shots, many more examples to show and I can do so if there is interest.
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