I love photography and always enjoy an opportunity to learn more about my camera and the art of photography itself. Thanks to The Crafty Wife, I and other photo loving ladies are getting some free lessons on how to put our DSLRs to their best use.
This lesson is all about shutter speed. What is shutter speed? The teachers at NoBadFoto.com tell us this:
The shutter speed controls the amount of time that the shutter curtain is left open. – See more at: http://www.nobadfoto.com/understanding-exposure-3.html#s1
In other words, this setting controls how much “motion” you will catch in a still photo. That sounds a little weird, doesn’t it? Let’s look at a few of my lesson photos to explain. When the shutter speed is set to a slow pace, such as 1/4 of a second, running water looks like this:
f22 1/4 shutter speed 400iso
There is not a lot of detail in the water and when it hits the sink:
f22 1/4 shutter speed 400iso
It shows up like a puddle instead of running water. Now let’s hike up the speed to 1/1000 of a second and see what happens.
f3.5 1/1000 shutter speed 1600 iso
There are a lot more details in the water and you start to see individual droplets instead of one continuous running stream.
f3.5 1/1000 shutter speed 1600 iso
See all of the extra detail in the water. Now imagine if that was a person or animal running. If you want a clear shot of their “motion”, you need to speed up the shutter to catch them in action. I decided to turn my camera all of the way up to 1/3200 of a second just to see what it would look like.
f3.5 1/3200 shutter speed 3200 iso
There is even more detail, but the lighting becomes harder to perfect at this speed, especially indoors. So, what have I learned? I now know the next time I want to take motion or action shots to crank up that shutter speed if I don’t want any blur. Of course, if I am shooting running water and want that smoky look, I will need to really slow it down and hold the camera very steady to reduce shakiness.
This has been a great lesson and I so appreciate The Crafty Wife for hosting these tutorials.
Picture Perfect Cooking 