Shutter Speed

If you are a photographer, it is crucial to learn how lighting and shutter speed can affect your pictures. If you just like taking pictures, you could leave your camera on an automatic setting and it will take good pictures. If you are considering photography as a career you need to learn what settings will capture the best pictures. This week in my black and white photography class, we learned how fstop settings (which controls the amount of exposure) and shutter speed settings can really help you capture a beautiful photo. I want to show you an example of how important it is to know your camera and know what settings will help you capture that awesome picture. If you look at the picture below of the water dripping off of the icicles, you can see that there is a difference. In the picture on the left, I left my camera on the no flash setting (it looks like a circle with a lightning bolt crossed out).

As you can see, the water dripping off of the icicles is blurred, which looks okay but I thought it may be cool to be able to do a stop motion picture and see if I could catch the water droplets actually falling off of the icicles. In the picture on the right, I changed the setting to the motion setting (which looks like a little man running) and took the same picture again. As you can see, the water droplets are no longer blurred. This is because I sped up the shutter speed. I was able to capture the individual water droplets because the picture was exposed for a shorter amount of time. I could have slowed it down even more for even clearer droplets, but I just wanted to show you a basic example of how the shutter speed is important.