Hello fellow idiots! Today I’m going to teach you the foundation of all creative photography. The reason why you can take photos at the speed of light (literally) or catch the movement of the waves. It is shutter speed.
We all have heard of it, and the idea of how it works is in the name. It is the speed of your shutter. By setting up your shutter to the thousands you can get a running athlete caught in time with precision. By setting it low, you can catch the night sky moving above you (with a tripod of course!). But you cannot really understand the mechanics of shutter speed until you are in the field.
With a high number in the thousands, you will get less light. This is of course because the shutter is shutting so fast that light barely has a chance to get through. You can counter this by setting you aperture low (which will affect your focus) or you can put up your ISO (which will add more noise to your image.) Both are the only methods other than editing that will brighten your image.
The same applies in the opposite direction. If you have a low number, your picture will have much more light and the image will contain some motion blur (not to be confused with regular blur caused by your focus!) To counter the brightness, you can either set your aperture higher (which will cause more things to be in focus) or turn down the ISO (which is the preferred method to avoid noise.)
Beware though, you will get blur even at 2000th of a second if you focus on a person that is moving fast enough towards or away from you. You might notice that many sports photos are shot from their side.
Shutter speed is all about the camera body and has nothing to do with your lens. So, when you shop for lenses, I recommend that you invest in one with the widest range of aperture. I don’t know many cameras made in the past 20 years that cannot shoot at a high shutter speed so don’t worry about that, just make sure it has a good ISO factor.
Now let me tell you a story about my second day on the job as a photographer for my college. I was tasked to photograph a graduation. I was brand new and only did one job before that which I did poorly anyways. But this was THE biggest event at my college. I spent hours in the heat photographing with my coworkers with much more experience than me. I decided to plant myself for 30 minutes as the people walked away with their diplomas. They were making a turn from a perpendicular sidewalk towards their seat and there I was, ready to shoot them. Well, I really fucked that one up.
My shutter speed was at 125th of a second. Way too low to photograph someone walking, especially towards me. Keep in mind I was also in automatic, the bane of every photographer’s existence. Here’s a video to reaffirm you.
All the photos were blurry, some of them so bad that I decided to not post them. Let’s just say that some people took to Twitter and roasted the school about never seeing their photo. So moral of the story, always have the right shutter speed.
Tune in next week when we talk about what my old clients thought about my photos!
