Tammi Nowack Photography Photoblog

This post has been a long time coming…I keep saying that I’ll post another photography 101 lesson, but the holidays got me bogged down and I just didn’t get the time to do it. Have no fear! Your next lesson is here!

I’m so witty.

ANYWAY….today we’ll discuss Shutter speed. You may remember me saying from the past couple of lessons, that light is everything in photography. Light, light, light….we need the light, follow the light, look for the light, walk towards the light. Wait! Don’t do that! Come back and learn about shutter speed. Aperture and your Shutter Speed are the two factors that most greatly influence what your photograph will look like.

The shutter, in the most simplistic of terms, is the device that “clicks” in your camera when it takes the photograph. It’s sort of like a blink – your camera lens is the eye, and the shutter is the actual action of blinking. Your shutter can stay open for varying amounts of time, hence the term shutter speed. It captures movement and it stays open for seconds, or fractions of a second, depending on what you set it to do.

Imagine (or actually do it) closing your eyes.  Now imagine a friend standing in front of you doing jumping jacks.  If you open your eyes in a blink and immediately shut them, they were only open for fractions of a second, and whatever you saw when you opened them would be “froze” into an image in your brain – your friend in mid-jump for example.   But if your eyes are closed and you open them for several seconds, you won’t just have an image seared into your brain, you’ll have movement, or action – like an entire sequence of a jumping jack.

If you look at your camera’s display settings, you’ll see several sets of numbers. Hopefully, these are starting to look LESS like sanskrit to you, and make more sense. You already know what the decimal number means from our lesson on aperture, so the next number you’re looking for is your shutter speed. In the image below, you can see the aperture is set to 4.0 and the number to the left of that is the shutter speed. It’s set to 1/4000, meaning 1/4000th of ONE second. That’s fast!

So…how does that translate into actual photos?? Let me show you.

Today I was playing with my boys in their room with all their Christmas loot and they so kindly agreed to assist me in a Shutter Speed tutorial using the following subjects:

I don’t know about you, but my money is on the green one in lane 2.

Let’s begin. We’ll start by turning the dial on our camera OFF the green dummy box and onto the TV or S button, which stands for TimeValue or Shutter Priority.

In the Aperture lesson, we learned that when you turn your dial to AV (Aperture Value) that you can set the aperture and the camera takes care of all the other settings for you. The same is true in TV or S mode – YOU are determining the Shutter Speed and the camera takes care of the rest.

We’ll start by setting the shutter speed to…oh….I dunno. Let’s try 25. That would mean the shutter will be open for 1/25th of a second. On your mark….get set…..GO!

Whoa. Did you see something go by??? Apparently 1/25 is a bit on the slow side. Unless you’re going for the blurry action sort of photo. Here it is again, in case you missed it the first time: 1/25;

Let’s turn the dial up and make our SS a little faster. Here’s what we get at 1/50:

Not quite AS blurry, but still blurry. Let’s try 1/80:

Hmmm….we’re getting there. Let’s jump up to 1/125:

Here we are at 1/200. Almost there……

Ahhh….here we are! 1/320 seems to do the trick and effectively “freeze” the motion.

So there you have it. Visual aides to help you learn shutter speed. So if you’re having trouble with blurry images (fast kids, sports photos, etc) then it’s probably because your shutter speed is too SLOW. Turn the dial to TV or S and crank that shutter speed up to freeze the action! Any questions??

Many thanks to my awesome “assistants” for helping me with this posting.

Until next time!

~t

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 8:31 am and is filed under Photography 101. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.