Shutter Speed

In this blog we look at shutter speed. What’s a shutter? The shutter, simply put, is a curtain in front of your sensor that opens and shuts again when the shutter button is pushed. Depending on how long this curtain/shutter is open for determines how bright or dark our image is, more light hits the sensor when the shutter is open longer producing a brighter image and less light hitting the sensor when shutter time is reduced making the image darker. Shutter speed can also be used to freeze motion or blur it. Below are images of our fluffy mascot “Schnitzel”, it’s my son’s toy, honest 🙂 and that’s what he named him. Anyway back to our examples, Schnitzel is hanging from my light fitting with some shoelaces I found laying around and I am swinging him back and forth across the camera frame. I have set my camera up on a tripod and focused centre of frame, resting position for Schnitzel. I set my focus and make sure my lens is set to manual so it doesn’t try re-focus when I want to capture a shot. I start to swing Schnitzel and take images from fast shutter speeds, freezing his motion, to slow shutter speeds blurring his motion. You can also see in the faster shutter speeds, the images are darker and as our shutter speed gets slower the images become brighter. So let’s take a look at the different shutter speeds below.

A little bit of motion blur starts happening now at 1/640sec, as we get slower with our shutter speeds the blur progressively becomes more prominent as we can see in the following images.

At a shutter speed of 1/10sec, Schnitzel starts to become just one big blur and unrecognisable.

Ok, so now we have some knowledge of shutter speed and freezing motion, let’s look at Panning. Panning is a technique that combines a slower shutter speed and panning motion of the camera to create a sense of speed around a moving object. With Schnitzel swinging again we try to move the camera with his motion to create blurring in the background but trying to keep focus on him. This is easier than it sounds, haha, it took 36 sd cards and 3 hard drives to capture 4 images, haha jokes, no but really, it took some patience to get a half decent example. Trial and error when it comes to this technique. Here are those 4 images 😛

I attempted to capture cars driving past using my fast lens and tripod at night. After a few attempts, these are the best two examples.

Now that I’m out the front in the middle of the night, we might as well look at some Long-Exposure examples. Long-exposure photography is exactly that, photography using long-duration shutter speeds to capture stationary subjects sharp and blur moving elements. It is also great for night time shots. Below are some examples of Long-exposure at night.

It’s not just night time you can use long-exposure, daytime is also a great time to use long-exposure. I will write a separate blog tomorrow on day-time long-exposure and ND filters. For now, I’m going to keep playing around in the dark with long-exposures and show a little of what we call Light Painting. Light painting is using light within a long-exposure image to produce all kinds of awesome light effects.

The above image is a long-exposure and light shined/painted around the subject to illuminate and highlight edges. The below image is a light trail in the mirror produced by long-exposure and capturing the lights of the car as it drove past.

The light trail in the above image is my phone torch, directed at the lens and swirled for effect. You can get creative and experiment with different lights and techniques, the possibilities are endless. Below are some more examples of light painting using led lights.