Nikon Patents In-Camera Feature for Sharper Panning Photographs

A new Nikon patent unearthed by Egami shows that the company has developed a new in-camera feature that assists in panning photographs. Tracking a moving subject with your camera and shooting a longer exposure shot creates photos that contain motion blur and a sense of action, but getting the subject perfectly sharp can be difficult. Nikon wants to use some fancy digital trickery to get around this problem. The feature snaps two photographs — one at a slower shutter speed and one at a faster one — and then selectively blends the images together. The subject subject in the fast shutter speed shot is extracted and used to replace the blurry one, producing an image that has a blurred background but sharp moving subject.