Visualizing: the Shutter Speed at Work

Last time, we talked about everything we needed to know about shutter speed. First and foremost, we discussed what the shutter and the shutter speed are. We talked about how crucial they are inn enabling you to adapt to different situations.

We also discussed how the shutter speed is measured and what are its implications to your photography. Lastly, we brushed on the applications of different shutter speeds and how you can use them to take more complex photography styles like the long-exposure.

Apart from that, we tried to connect our lessons from aperture with our knowledge on shutter speed in order to give us a better sense of how exposure works. Along the way, we will also tie up those two topics with the topic of ISO to complete your exposure basics.

As mentioned, what we will be doing today is to polish our knowledge on how shutter speed works. By visualizing the effects of shutter speed, we will be able to get a better grasp on the concept and proceed to the next topics.

After this lesson, you should be able to freely practice shutter speed already and explore its full effects.

Timing is Key

As you may recall, the aperture is responsible of letting light through the size of its opening. However, when it comes to shutter speed, time is of the essence.

We already discussed the importance of shutter speed and its value in photography is simply irreplaceable. Learning how to time you shutter speed well can spell the difference between a bad shot and an award-winning image.

During the last article, we established that slower your shutter is, the longer you are exposing your sensor to light and the longer it is exposed, the higher the amount of light penetrating.

On the other hand, we also established that the opposite happens when you have a fast shutter. With a shutter speed ranging from 1/100 to 1/4000 of a second, you are only allowing a really small amount.

Visualizing

In order to help you visualize the effects of shutter speed, here is a picture of an pinwheel which was shot through different shutter speeds.


We mentioned before that as your shutter speed decreases, the timeframe of your shot also lengthens. As you can see in this picture, as the shutter speed slows down, you get to capture more of the action instead of getting a sharp image of your subject. 

The leftmost picture was shot as 1/500 of a second whereas the rightmost picture had a shutter speed of 1/10. You will notice how the blades of the pinwheel start to sharpen as the shutter speed increased. 

When shooting a subject, we always want a sharp image, right? However, you can actually make your shot more creative by slowing the shutter down and this practice is called long-exposure photography.

Visualizing long-exposure

Image A

Image B

The extent of long-exposure photography is perfectly depicted in these two photos. As you can see, image B has longer streak lights as compared to those of Image A. 

The streak lights of image B are longer that image A’s simply because image B was exposed longer through a slower shutter speed. The lights are produced by cars and by giving your camera a longer timeframe for the picture, it is able to catch the journey of the car light’s longer. 

Long-exposure photography is one of the best creative applications of a slow shutter speed. Do note, however, that this photography style takes a lot of practice and knowledge to master.

Conclusion

Today, we visualized the shutter speed at work and how it actually affects the outcome of your image. 

We used the image of a pinwheel as an example where as the shutter speed increases, the blades get sharper and clearer. With this, we can see that if you want a more solid subject, you have to increase the shutter speed. 

We also discussed that a slow shutter speed is not necessarily a bad thing since you can still produce amazing images like those of long-exposure photography. 

Note, however, that as you increase the shutter speed, you are actually letting in lesser light which results to darker images. This makes shutter speed a vital part of what is called the exposure triangle - a powerful concept that is responsible for everything related to light in photography. 

Apart from the shutter speed, the aperture is also a part of the said triangle. The third side of the exposure triangle is the ISO which will be our topic for the next lesson. 

We hope you got to fully understand the concept of shutter speed today. Be sure to share this article to your peers to help them master it as well.