Shutter Speed

Shutter speed is the length of time you are leaving the shutter open on your camera. It can make your photos lighter (if you leave it open longer) or darker (if you set it a little faster).

Leaving the shutter open longer can have the effect of blowing out the highlights of your image (making the whites too white for the camera to capture any detail). If you close the shutter too quickly you can end up with images that are under exposed (making the blacks too dark for the camera to capture any detail).

Understanding shutter speed is a very important step in photography. If you are trying to shoot sports and you notice that most of your subjects end up blurry and out of focus, then the shutter speed you are using is probably too slow. You will have to find a way to speed up your shutter. Either turning the ISO up or by opening the aperture by a stop or two will hopefully sort this out.

The photo above was taken at 1/500th of a second.

If you’re shooting a waterfall and you want that soft wispy look that so many waterfall shots have, then you’ll need to slow your shutter speed down. Lowering your ISO and stopping down on your aperture will help with this.

Once you understand how Shutter Speed affects your images you will find that it will help you get what you want from your camera a lot faster than just shooting images with random settings until you get what you want.

The above image was taken using a shutter speed of 4 seconds.

I hope this article has helped you understand how to use shutter speed and how it affects your images.