A few days ago, I went looking for a waterfall.
And the fact that I did is important for this video, because today I'm talking
about one of the biggest camera settings out there.
It's called shutter speed. And there's no better subject to photograph while I'm
talking about shutter speed than a waterfall. Now, step one, before I even
explain what shutter speed is, I just want to demonstrate how it works by
showing you a few sample photos. And the only thing that I changed in each
picture is the shutter speed. Here they are. Now, from left to right, a fast shutter
speed to a slow shutter speed. Another way to phrase that would be, a short
exposure on the left and a long exposure on the right. And immediately you can see
that the biggest difference here is how bright the photos are. And that brings us
to the definition of shutter speed. It's actually pretty simple.
There's something called shutter curtains that sit in front of your
camera sensor and block the light. It's very similar to the shutters on a window;
it's not some fancy terminology. And any time that you take a photo, the
shutter curtains move out of the way and allow light to hit your camera sensor.
That's how you get a photo in the first place. Shutter speed is just the length
of time that your camera sensor, or your film, ends up exposed to the light. That's
all there is to the definition. But from that definition, you can probably see why
those four photos have different brightness levels. The brightest one, with
a long exposure, literally captured more light. The shutter curtains were open for
a longer period of time. And then the darkest photo, with a fast shutter speed,
was only exposed to the outside world for a brief fraction of a second. And now
I'm going to fill in the blanks with the actual shutter speeds that I used here.
On the left, I was at 1/100 of a second shutter speed. On the right, I was at 0.4
seconds. And then, of course, there's the shutter speeds in between. These are all
very normal values for something like landscape photography; the longest
shutter speed that I used here was 0.4 seconds. But you can set up to 30 seconds
on most cameras today - and, in fact, with a special remote accessory, you can extend
that without any real limit. And even though my shortest exposure here was
1/100 of a second, you can set 1/4000 of a second on most cameras -
and even 1/8000 on many of them. That's just insanely fast - and also very
dark, because you're only capturing light for 1/8000 of a second. You just
won't get very much of it. So, why does the range need to be so large - 1/8000
of a second all the way to 30 seconds? The basic answer is just that
some places are brighter than others. If you're camping out under the full moon,
for example, you don't have that much light to work with. You'll probably need
a very long exposure just to capture much of a photo in the first place. Like
this photo, which I took at 30 seconds. But then the next morning, you wake up,
and the sun is bright. In that case, you'll need a much shorter exposure.
Anything like 30 seconds, and your entire photo is just going to be white - totally
overexposed. Here, in this example, I used a shutter speed of 1/800th of a second. Now,
both photos are properly exposed, but that was only possible because I used my
shutter speed to compensate for the available light. So, hopefully that's a
good demonstration of how and why shutter speed affects the amount of
light that you capture. It's not the only way to change how much light you capture,
but it definitely is one of the most important. Let's jump back to those
waterfall photos again. You might notice one more difference between them,
especially when I zoom in. The motion in the waterfall is different. The water
droplets in the first photo are almost frozen in place. By comparison, the later
photos have increasingly more motion blur. So, why is this? Well, remember how
shutter speed works at a fundamental level. It's the amount of time that your
camera sensor is exposed to the outside world. So, if you think about it, anything
that moves a significant amount during your exposure will not be pin sharp in
the photo. It'll kind of have a ghost behind it, like the water droplets do
here. And even something that moves slowly can still be blurry if your
shutter speed is long enough. One of the more famous examples is the Milky Way at night.
The stars are obviously moving very slowly across the sky, but even then,
if I use something crazy like a 5-minute shutter speed, I can get very blurry
stars in my photo. But let's look at a more typical example. A really easy one
is something like a ceiling fan that's moving at a constant rate. If I take one
photo at a fast shutter speed, like 1/800th of a second, the fan looks almost
motionless. It's not *actually* motionless, but it appears that way in the photo. If
I take another photo at, say, 1/50th of a second, we're getting a lot more motion
blur. And if I go all the way to 1/3 of a second, it doesn't even look
like there are fan blades any more. It's just one giant blur. Still, the light bulbs
in the center are totally sharp because they didn't move during the
exposure. Now, you're probably already thinking about how much creativity this
unleashes for the real world. You can use long exposures to capture amazing photos
of something like the ocean, or fireworks, or really anything that moves. And you
can use fast shutter speeds to get pin-sharp photos of subjects like sports
or wildlife. But before I go into all that, I just want to make a quick side
note. Normally, these three photos would have had huge differences in how bright
they are. In this demonstration, I corrected for that with two other camera
settings: aperture and ISO. I won't talk about them in this video, but I'll
explain them in some future videos because they're all very closely
connected. And let me jump back to another example photo. If you can, try to
guess what shutter speed I used here. I know it's early to throw out a pop quiz,
but it really helps to look at a photo and try to figure out what camera
settings the photographer used. Ready? My shutter speed here was exactly one
second. And there are some clues. First off, there's definitely motion blur in
this picture. You can see all the streaking in the foreground,
and the waves in the background definitely are not pin sharp. And that's
because one second is a pretty long shutter speed - but it's also not too long.
We do still have some shapes in the water, and that's pretty clear. I mean, if
this were something like a 30 second shutter speed, you'd have more than just
one wave crashing ashore. Here's another ocean photo, but this time
with 30 seconds. Huge difference. The water barely even looks like water in
this photo! It really looks like someone here turned on a fog machine. And that's
even more true in this next photo - also 30 seconds. Here, it was just wave after
wave crashing onto the shore. And the result looks like nothing we would ever
see in our day-by-day life. That's one of the huge powers of shutter speed - but
it's also a potential source of blurry photos. If you're photographing some
fast-moving subject that you want completely sharp, like a bird flying
through the sky, you need to be very careful that your shutter speed is fast
enough. One tenth of a second, for example, won't cut it. You'll get a blurry photo
every time. And even if your subject is completely motionless, how often are you
handholding your camera rather than using a tripod? Because no one can hold
their camera perfectly steady without any movement. And, of course, camera
movement makes your photos blurry.
So then, what shutter speeds are safe?
That depends on four different factors. Number one: how fast is your subject moving?
Pretty self-explanatory. If you're photographing a race car, you'll
obviously need a faster shutter speed then if you're photographing a turtle.
And number two: how stable is your camera? There's a big difference between a
tripod, a monopod, handholding your camera, and even handholding from a
helicopter. And there's also some cameras or lenses with "image stabilization" - and
this compensates and affects how much camera shake you actually capture.
Number three: how far zoomed in is your lens, and how much are you cropped?
In either case, when you're magnifying your subject, you also magnify the blur in
your photo. So, you'll need a faster shutter speed in order to compensate.
And number four: how close are you to your subject? If you get extremely close to
what you're photographing, just a small amount of movement - either from your
camera or from your subject - can result in a huge amount of blur.
And those are the four! That's really all the background that you need to know before
going out and testing this yourself. But some photographers may still want some
more specific recommendations. If you do, the basic rule that you'll hear about is
to use a shutter speed of 1 over your focal length. Right? So if you're using a
50mm lens, use a shutter speed of 1/50 of a second or faster. I don't
love this rule, personally. I don't think that it's flexible enough to deal with
the huge variety of things that photographers shoot - and, a lot of times,
you'll still get blurry photos when you use it. But if you're a complete beginner
at shutter speed, and you have no idea where to start, it will at least get you
into the right ballpark. Still, it's no substitute for practice. At the end of
the day, you just need to go out there and develop your own internal sense of
what shutter speeds to use in a given situation. And I'll be frank here - it's
not always easy. If it's dark out, and you're taking pictures of a moving
subject, you're kind of facing conflicting goals here. You will want a
long exposure in order to capture a lot of light, but you can't *use* a long
exposure, or your subject is going to look blurry.
Luckily, shutter speed is not the only camera setting available. Two of the
others, which I briefly mentioned earlier in this video, are aperture and ISO. And
those are complicated topics in their own right, so they'll be the next two
videos in our series about exposure. But for now, hopefully, you have a good
background at least on shutter speed. And the five-second recap is: it changes how
much light you capture, and how much motion blur. Obviously, internalizing that
and picking the right shutter speed is a bit more complicated, but that's why my
motto is always just to keep practicing. That's the best way to learn anything in
photography, shutter speed included.