SHUTTER SPEEDS!

Paige Ward

shutter speed/ exposure time is the length of time a camera's shutter is open when taking a photograph. 

Fast Shutter Speed:When the shutter speed is fast, it can help to freeze action completely, here is an example of a photographer who has done this:

Fast shutter speed is used for a lot of sports and wildlife photography. Pro sport photographers use fast shutter speed to capture the action. They have large lenses with wide apertures, these can help a lot when using fast shutter speed. But you don’t need them to, with good light and high ISO you can still successfully use fast shutter speed.

Photographers often use extremely high ISO speed to add grain and this is a trick they use to add a certain mood they want. This technique works great when converting photographs to black & white. The only disadvantages about using fast shutter speed is that they can produce lower quality photographs. The faster the speed, the lower the quality produced. Also you see less realistic colours and loose some sharpness.

‘A fast shutter speed could be considered anything over 1/500th of a second. But modern digital cameras go much faster than this. If you have a digital SLR you may well be able to select shutter speeds up to 1/8,000th of a second incredibly fast!’�

Slow Shutter Speed:

There are two reasons why photographers use slow shutter speed these reasons are- It is quite dark and they need o let more light into the camera They want to introduce blur into the photograph.

Slow shutter speed can create an motion blur effect, where moving objects appear blurred along the direction of the motion. This effect is used in some advertisement for cars and motorbikes, where a sense of speed and motion is communicated to the viewer by intentionally blurring the moving wheels. Slow shutter speeds are also used to photograph lighting or other objects at the night or even in dim environments with a tripod. Landscape photographers intentionally use slow shutter speeds to create a sense of motion on rivers and waterfalls, while keeping everything else in focus. When using a low shutter speed anything that moves in the scene will blur, this can be used creatively in photographs. This type of shutter speed is considered to be the slowest that you can handle without introducing camera shake. Motion can also be frozen to an extent with a camera flash, for example the photograph of the bird.

Example of motion blur

ISO:

ISO is useful for digital photography because, you can change the ISO setting for every shot you take without the need to change film.The standard ISO is what is used everyday, this gives accurate colour rendition and ‘clean’ noise free photographs is 100 ISO. If the camera is set to a lower ISO of 50 or less, you will notice that the photographs become a little more saturated in their colours. You can also turn the ISO higher which can create some good shots for certain photographs for example indoor sport photographs. The biggest problem about using high ISO is the quality deterioration.