Life, Love and Part 1: Shutter Speed

I’m a hobbyist at best. If you look at my portfolio you might be inclined to argue and I’ll flatter myself by agreeing with you but the fact remains, I’m a hobbyist at best. I have won a contest or two with my work and I’ve had several people ask me to take family photos or teach them how I do it but I promise you, to get to my skill level isn’t all that difficult. To begin with, it’s a numbers game. More like shooting a target with a shotgun, if you pack enough buckshot and point it in the right direction you’ll eventually get something into the bulls-eye. Likewise for every 100 shots you take at least one has got to turn out and the rest will quietly be removed from memory like the time you kissed your cousin. Something no one ever has to know about.

But it’s more than just safety in numbers. If you take a thousand shots letting your camera decide your settings you’ll simply get average photos. We don’t want average photos, what we want to do is improve our odds, mitigating the suck factor. This is where a little understanding comes in. Working with your camera should be a romance, clumsy and full of abuse at first but eventually you become familiar with all the buttons that get them going just the way you want them to at the right time.

Obviously it’s important to understand the fundamentals. Sure you can read about the basics of photography, the rule of thirds, looking at the background, framing the subject, blah blah blah. Don’t get me wrong, those are all important in positioning the camera right, but you also need to understand how to capture the light and movement best (shutter), change the depth of field (aperture), and use warm and cold colors (ISO). For the purpose of this article I will only talk about the Shutter.

For any beginner I believe the Shutter is the best starting point. To begin think of the camera as an eyeball, in this analogy your shutter is your eye lids. Every time you blink you are opening and closing the shutter. Now understand that instead of this eyeball processing several images it only processes one image per opening of the shutter. This means that the longer your eyelids are open the more light is landing on your film. The more light that that lands on your film, the brighter the image becomes. If too much light gets on the film then you will only see white, if too little gets on the film images become too dark to see or even black. So is the shutter on your camera.

At first it doesn’t sound that exciting; you may be thinking “Whoopee, I can make my pictures brighter and darker with this.” True, but you’d be surprised how much an image changes by restricting how much light can get through. Don’t believe me? Try this exercise. Take your camera out to photograph a sub-average sunset. Now take your camera and set the shutter to about 1/1000 to 1/2500 and start taking photos. If you’ve got a digital camera you’ll instantly be surprised. You’ll see that your camera is capturing brighter colors because the light doesn’t have as long a window to get in there and dilute the image.

Two pics taken at the same time with different shutter speeds (the one on the left was taken with a faster shutter speed).

Want something even better? Go to the beach a couple hours before sunset, have someone walk between you and the ocean and snap the picture with a shutter of 1/4000 of a second with the sun directly in the photo. What will happen is your friends and family will suddenly think you are Mozart or are wasting your life in accounting when you could be shooting for National Geographic. But you and I both know better.

So tricking the light is really cool. But there is another side effect of playing with the shutter: movement. This can either be really annoying or really cool. For instance if you are taking a night picture you will want your shutter to be open longer to let more light in, however when you take the picture you’ll notice that everything is blurry. The problem is when you hit the button on the camera you jerk it slightly so the entire image continues to record itself slightly off center. This is where tripods and timers (letting the camera count down before taking a photo, this reduces camera movement that happens when your finger pushes the picture button) come in handy. But it isn’t all bad. You know those photos of rivers and waterfalls and fountains where it looks like white cotton candy is flowing or the images of the stars rotating in perfect circles? These can be achieved by lowering the shutter speed to settings such as 1/25, 1/10, 1” (1” is one second for those of you wondering) and so on.

Slower shutter speeds can also be great if you want to show action in a photograph. Like a racecar careening off the track at 160 mph or an eagle attacking an orphan. When there is an element of blur in the image it tends to convey a better story than the crisp images that are achieved with higher shutter speeds. But again, you’re the artist and I’m sure if you get a picture of an eagle attacking an orphan people will be impressed regardless of whether there’s an element of blur involved or if it’s completely still or if that one guy that manages to get his head in all your pictures is standing off in the distance.

Now if you are really smart you’ve already caught the catch 22. You’re thinking if I slow the shutter down then won’t more light get in? And if I slow it down to 1” won’t my image be completely white? Depends.

First you’ll need to adjust for the time of day. Slower shutter speeds are better for darker spaces. However if you really want to get that cotton candy effect of the rapids (which is way cool) then slower is better. It is possible to shoot 1” and even slower shutter speeds at mid-day. You just have to make sure you’re adjusting the aperture size and the ISO sensitivity to compensate for the amount of light. The bad news is that is just a little beyond the scope of this article. The good news is that most cameras now days are pretty smart. They’ll realize that by leaving your shutter open for one second they’ll also need to shrink the aperture size and lower the ISO speed.

Practice with the shutter speed to begin with and soon you’ll find you have a pretty good feel for it and some pretty cool photos. I recommend getting a digital camera because you get immediate results and can quickly remedy an improper setting and even experiment to learn some new tricks.

The faster the shutter the higher the bottom number, the higher the bottom number, the less light will get imprinted onto your image. At extremes this can lead to some incredibly artistic representations of otherwise mundane scenarios.

The slower the shutter the lower the number, the lower the number the more light gets onto your image. This is advantageous if you are shooting in an area with limited light. But remember that it will record more movement as well. Not entirely a bad thing, as it too can be used to reinvent a landscape or show a story. Just remember that when you are shooting at lower speeds you will probably need a tripod and should probably use the timer on the camera.

One last bit of advice; if you’re using a telescopic lens you should know that they are incredibly sensitive to movement. Faster shutter speeds are recommended, if light is low however, you should use either a monopod or a tripod. Otherwise all your pictures will be very blurry and your heart will be very sad.