Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: pan shot

I wasn't expecting to take this. I was walking in a field on my first visit to England in 1993, being fully aware that I was next to a mainline (in this case the Great Eastern, if I'm not mistaken), and more worried about being electrocuted, as the trees hadn't been cut back very well. Nevertheless, I had my Kodak Star 735 in my hands, and then I heard an indescribable roar doppling towards me. The trees were blocking my view, but I raised the camera, caught this BR freight coming down the line at what must have been at least 80 m.p.h., and possibly faster, and swung around as it came by, getting this pan shot. It was all over in about 2 seconds, and I got the shot more or less by pure luck combined with reaction time, but I still think that it's one of my best train shots of all time. The blur of extreme speed (at least to my American mind of the time), combined with the memory of the noise, keep this shot in my head today whenever I'm attempting another one like it, which I should note I've never again succeeded in taking, even with a good SLR.

I saw this coming from a long way off, but didn't get the classic angle of it bearing down on me, although I regretted it somewhat later, as I never got the number. This Ceske Drahy Class 371 electric was pulling a MAV (Hungarian State Railways) Eurocity from somewhere in Germany to Budapest, via Prague, so it obviously wasn't going to stop in Roztoky, and I wanted to be sure that I got this pan shot. I set my camera up, passed up the offset head-on view, and swung my body around for the pan. It worked perfectly, and now I have this, which may be my best pan shot ever. I hope you like it.

I took this on one of my many trips to London, and until I found it in my collection a few weeks ago I had forgotten completely that I had it. I figure it should fit nicely into the various rail-oriented groups on Flickr, and interest a number of people, so why not post it? :-)

I took this shot on a slightly snowy day in 2001 during my second to last full day living in Norwich, England. I figured I wouldn't get back anytime soon, so I shot a bunch of photos so that I would have them. In reality, I returned many times to visit friends, but I didn't know I would do so at the time. This is one of my best shots that day, a pan of one of Anglia's Intercities departing Thorpe Street for London Liverpool Street. These Class 86 electrics were originally designed in the mid-1960s for use on the newly-electrified West Coast Mainline, but when the Great Eastern Mainline was electrified in the 1980s they were mostly cascaded to the Great Eastern. When I first went to school in Norwich in 1998, nearly all had been transferred to this service, with few left on the West Coast, and now all are on the Great Eastern, if I'm not mistaken. I rode these trains many times, of course, and I would ride one out of Norwich two days later. As a point of side interest, the blurred locomotive in the upper right is a English, Welsh, & Scottish Class 67 diesel, a 125 m.p.h. locomotive used mainly on mail trains. It turns out that I was wise to catch this, as I don't think I got another shot of it before it was scrapped at Cardiff in October of 2004.

This is a so-so pan shot that I took of a T3 in Namesti Bratri Synku. It's not perfect, of course, since the tram itself blurred slightly, and I got a bad light leak down the middle, but it's a Lomo so I figured I'd post it to Flickr to see what people think. :-)