Lesson Three: Master Shutter Speed

Shutter speed is extremely valuable and useful to a photographer no matter if you are extremely experienced or do not have much experience at all.  Adjusting your shutter speed allows you to capture those race cars flying by you at one-hundred fifty plus miles an hour in a clean, vibrant crisp way.  Maybe you want to focus more on the speed of the cars rather than the detail they have.  Shutter speed will help you achieve this as well.  If you wanted to capture these images or any images in a clean precise detailed way then you would adjust your camera to a faster shutter speed.  But on the other hand, if you decided you wanted to focus more on the speed or what was passing by or moving around you then you would want to adjust your camera to use a slower shutter speed.  This will give your picture that blurred motion view.  The slower your shutter speed the more motion and movement is shown within the picture.  Typically however, in everyday life a faster shutter speed is used.  This give you a accurate detailed picture no matter what you are photographing.  This also ties in nicely with last weeks lesson on aperture.  If you have a beautiful flower in the foreground you are taking a photo of but the leave in the back ground are taking away from the flower, then not only can you adjust the aperture along with the shutter speed to get the desired effect but the camera automatically does that for you to a certain point.  The camera naturally uses a larger aperture with a faster shutter speed so you can focus more on the foreground and less on the what’s going on in the background.  Neat huh!  Another great perk to using a faster shutter speed (which really helps me personally out) is that if you do not necessarily have the steadiest hands in the world it is not too big of a problem.  A faster speed tends to help eliminate any kind of blurriness you may receive from shaky hands.      In my first post I talked about a wedding I had photographed.  When I was taking these pictures I was using a faster shutter speed to ensure the pictures were as vibrant, clean, crisp, and detailed as possible.  This also took care of my shaky hands problem.  Granted my hands do not shake to terribly bad in some cases with some cameras it is enough to potentially ruin a picture and that would be a shame.  This also allows you to take series of pictures in a row without having to really pause in between.  At the wedding I took probably a series of 10 or so pictures that included before during and after their kiss.  If you took these photos and put them together you would have like a mini flip book!  Unfortunately I may be a little biased on this subject.  I have really only worked with faster shutter speeds.  I don’t have enough tim using slower shutter speeds to even say I have really experienced them.  So when my camera is working properly or I find a replacement one (whichever comes first)  I will be focusing on taking pictures with a slower shutter speed and getting better acquainted with that so I can accurately decide which I like better!