To do it, you'll want to use your camera's lowest ISO setting and a fairly slow shutter speed--about 1/8 or 1/15 second. The part you'll need to practice is the actual panning: Track the subject in your viewfinder, and as it passes right in front of you, gently press the shutter release and continue turning to track the subject. The more smoothly you can do that, the better your pans will be. For more details, check out "."

I recently purchased a gray card. It came with some very basic instructions, which I am not sure how to apply. How do I use this card to set my camera's white balance? After that, will the colors automatically match?--Wayne Johnson, Santa Monica, California

A gray card (or a white card--either will work) can be used to make sure that your camera accurately records the colors in a scene. If you don't have a gray card, you can probably leave the camera's white balance on "auto" and the camera does a reasonable job of setting the colors. But if you're a stickler for accurate color, you should know that your camera always gets the color balance at least a little wrong. Always. But you can fix that: If you hold a gray card in front of the camera lens and tell the camera, "this is gray," then it'll record colors accurately as long as you remain in the same lighting conditions.

To do this, you might need to dig out your camera's user guide to figure out how to set the white balance. Have someone hold the card in front of the camera and fill the viewfinder with the gray (or white) surface. Use the camera's white balance control to set that as the correct level, and then take pictures as you normally would. Just remember that you will need to reset the white balance every time you take the camera somewhere different, since the white balance setting you made with the gray card only applies in that specific situation, with whatever light was available at that time.