As a part of the photography course that I am studying at the moment, we were taken out on an excursion to go around Sydney’s CBD and take a range of photos.

A lot of these photos were very technical based shots and therefore lacked any elegance… however this the reason I wanted to share them. After going on this excursion and then seeing the photos side by side, I found that the overall picture of how shutter speed affects a photo being taken became far clearer.

Essentially from what I have learned, shutter speed (also known as exposure time) controls the effect of how quickly a moment is captured in time. For example, the higher the shutter speed, the quicker the moment is captured. The easiest way I have found to remember this is that if you take a photo of a fountain with an extremely high shutter speed you will be able to see each individual droplet caught in time, however on a slower shutter speed you would tend to see the flowing effect of the water rather than individual droplets.

So lets go through a few examples (click on any image to expand it):

This photo has the following technical specs (so to speak):

Camera: Canon EOS 50D
Exposure Time: 0.004s (1/250)
Aperture : f/9.0
ISO: 800
Focal Length: 56mm (89.6mm in 35mm)

Note the exposure time (shutter speed) for this photo is 1/250th of a second, which is known as a fast(ish) shutter speed. If you take a look at the photo you will notice that all the cars are in focus including the blue car in the foreground which was moving at the time.

The technical specs for this second shot are:

Camera: Canon EOS 50D
Exposure Time: 0.0166s (1/60)
Aperture: f/16.0
ISO: 800
Focal Length” 56mm (89.6mm in 35mm)

In this photo the exposure time has been dropped to 1/60th of a second and you can see that all the cars in the background remain in sharp focus as they are not moving. However the red car in the foreground has begun to become blurred due to the movement of the car and the lower shutter speed.

As we take this to the other extreme of the scale we begin to get significant blurring on moving objects as you will see in this final image.

Camera: Canon EOS 50D
Exposure Time: 0.25s (1/4)
Aperture : f/32.0
ISO: 320
Focal Length: 56mm (89.6mm in 35mm)

This image was taken with an exposure time of only a quarter of a second which meant that the car had time to move across the field of vision in between the time that the shutter opened and closed and this is what causes the blurring.

You may have also noticed that the Aperture was raised incrementally in line with the lowering shutter speed, this is due to the direct relationship between the aperture and exposure time (or shutter speed if you prefer). I will however cover this at a later time.

If you want you can see even further increments in between the ones I have placed above which I have placed in my Eccentric Reality gallery and they are on pages one and two at the link above.

As a final note I wanted to provide one slightly more practical example which I mentioned above and that has assisted me in remembering how shutter speed affects a photograph. If you take a look at this photo you will see the effect that I mentioned earlier in regards to freezing a droplet of water in time. Had a lower shutter speed been used the water would have simply looked like it was flowing or in other words, more blurry.

Keep an eye out for the next post on aperture. In the mean time if you want to see all the photos that I took on my recent outing with all the technical details listed alongside you can check out the album here.