Shutter Speed

Do you know what is the function of your camera's shutter? How is the shutter of a camera an important aspect of a camera? It can actually control the amount of light entering the imaging medium and can be used to create different kind of effects.

You can use the shutter speed to adjust the speed of the shutter of a camera. The shutter will open for a short period (in fractions of seconds) to allow the imaging medium to be exposed by light for each exposure. It can be used to control the amount of light entering the imaging plane. With 'faster' speeds (shutter open for a short period of time), both the amount of light and the amount of image blurring from the motion of the subject and/or camera could be reduced. The shutter speed is considered an exposure setting because opening the shutter for twice as long lets in twice as much light which will increase the exposure of the image by one stop.

However you can also use it to create a nice picture with different effects: faster shutter speeds freeze a moving subject, slower speeds record a motion blur. There is no definition of wrong or right in photography. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A photo of a stream with a 1/800 second shutter can capture each sharp sparkling droplet of water frozen in mid-air, whereas a 4 second exposure would make the waterfall to flow in a stream like a smoke. Either one can look beautiful.

As you can see from the picture above, the car lights on the road can be seen as a continuous stream of light. This effect can be done by reducing the shutter speed (which means making the shutter open for a longer period of time. When the shutter is opened for a longer period, another thing to take note is to hold your camera as still as possible or else the picture taken will be totally blurry. This is effect is also known as long exposure.

The next picture is a photo of a water drop motion. To achieve this effect, you must set the shutter speed to about 1/200 and above (making the shutter close faster). This is because the motion of the water splash is a fast one, therefore a higher shutter speed is needed to capture the water splash in action.