Photo Friday – Intro to Shutter Speed

You’re holding a camera in your hands and you want to explore something beyond Auto Mode. Before jumping to Manual Mode, where you control shutter speed, aperture and ISO to properly exposure an image, you need to understand each of those elements and how to control them.

Today I’ll talk about shutter speed and will then cover aperture and ISO in coming weeks, followed by a final post pulling them all together and how you can alter them to achieve different looks.

To play with controlling shutter speed before you fulling understand aperture or ISO, you can use Shutter Priority mode, in which you control shutter speed and the camera automatically adjusts the other settings to obtain a proper exposure.

What is shutter speed? It’s simply the amount of time the shutter is open, expressed in seconds, or fractions of a second. On most cameras, when the display reads “125″ it’s actually 1/125 of a second.

Some points to remember
- The amount of light seen by the sensor is doubled or halved with each doubling or halving of the speed. 1/250 lets in half as much light as 1/125 but twice as much light as 1/500.
- shutter speed of 1/125 sec of faster is typically necessary to freeze movement. Faster moving objects will require correspondingly faster shutter speeds.
- shutter speed slower than 1/60 sec or so will typically require a tripod to avoid motion blur. Vibration reduction (VR) lenses can help reduce motion blur a little bit.
- when selecting a shutter speed to use, you need to think about if there is anything in the image that is moving and how you capture that motion.

By varying the shutter speed, you can alter the appearance of an image. In this first image, taken in Boston’s Copley Plaza back in July, the shutter speed was 1/160 of a second. As a result of the relatively fast shutter speed, the water appears frozen in time.

Now look at the appearance of the water when I slow the shutter speed way down to 1/6 second, it takes on a smooth almost silky appearance.

Other elements of the photo look distinctly different as well, because I had to make adjustments in order maintain a similar overall exposure between the two images.

Next week I’ll talk about aperture, why it was different between these 2 photos and the effect it had.

Comments, questions, your own words of wisdom, they’re all fair game, so use the comments section!

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