Shutter speed and Exposure

In photography, shutter speed or exposure is the length of time when the film or sensor inside the camera is exposed to light, also when a camera's shutter is open when taking a photograph. The amount of light that reaches the image sensor is proportional to the exposure time. 1/500th of a second will let half as much light in as 1/250th. This will do two things. In a low light situation, it will allow you to take a picture without a flash but it will make the camera susceptible to camera shake without the use of a flash. The other use of shutter speed is for catching action. A fast shutter speed will freeze motion, so that the action will be frozen in time. An example of this is from a post a few days ago with my daughter jumping from the swing when I caught her perfectly in mid-air. If the shutter was set to slow this would have been caught as a blur due to the shutter remaining exposed allowing more of the motion to be caught by the sensor or film when film cameras were used. The pictures that I am including with today's post are some examples of how shutter speed affects the looks of an image that I used in a photography class that I took in college. You will see how there is motion frozen and how motion is blurred. The only thing done to make these effects is changing shutter speed on your camera. For those with the more basic point and shoot style cameras, play with your settings. There are usually several settings and many that change different things such as shutter for different types of shooting such as action. For those that have DSLR cameras, if you set your camera dial to "TV" you can set your shutter speed, allowing you to catch blurred or frozen action. So next time you get out, take a moment to play with some of these setting and see what you can do. If you go to sports games such as baseball, this can be really handy. Use rapid shutter release, you would be amazed at what you can get. Until next time, get out there, have fun, and take some great pictures.

I'm not sure what my settings were on these, unfortunately, but they are good visual examples of what the effect looks like. The second picture has some affect with use of the aperture adjustments also but we will discuss that in the future.

This is the one from a few days ago of my daughter and the swing.