Exposure and Shutter Speed !

To avoid over or underexposing your image light is of the most important aspects to consider when taking a photo. There are three things that affect how bright or dark your image will be: Aperture, ISO, and Shutter speed. adjusting these three things does more than just impact the brightness and darkness levels. In this post we look at the creative results shutter speed has on our images and how it allows a photographer more creative control.

Shutter speed is the duration of time the shutter remains open. Shutter speed is most often measured in fractions of a second. A long exposer is when the shutter curtain remains open for more than 1/30 of a second. The curtain on early cameras remained open exposing the plate to light for a long period of time. The earliest images required an exposer time of 20 minutes. photography subjects needed to remain completely still for long periods of time for the image to come out crisp and not blurred by their movement. in class, we recreated this experience by taking our own long exposer portraits. we used photoshop to blend our image with a silver plate texture and convert to black to white.

Today the sensors in our cameras don't require such long exposure times, but long exposures are sometimes still necessary in low light environments. For the same reason we had to sit still for our long exposer portraits it is important to understand that a log exposure affects motion blur. This can lead to creative results such as light painting where you can use lower your aperture and set a timer to take in light for this long and you can also follow a car with your camera and it will create a blurred background around a car or any moving object.

A short exposure (Fast shutter speed) is useful where there is a lot of light available, such as daylight, strobe lights, beach, or snow. The effect of a short exposer is freezing action. This is great for animal photography, sports photography, taking pictures of children and things that are moving quickly. This can lead to creative results such as using a short exposure for a balloon popping mid way and unleash the water from its latex prison.