In this portion of “How Does Your Camera Work?” I will be discussing shutter speed, and how it can affect your images.

So what is shutter speed? Well this setting determines how quickly your shutter opens and closes. The longer your shutter is open the more light you are letting in, and the more light that is hitting your sensor. Shutter speeds are measured in fractions of seconds, such as: 1/30, 1/60, 1/250, etc.

This ability to set your shutter speed has a multitude of benefits. A quicker shutter speed allows for more sharpness to your images. Unfortunately, you do sacrifice light with a quicker shutter speed since your shutter isn’t open as long., which means in order to obtain the right exposure you will need to compensate accordingly with your ISO setting and/or Aperture setting. Oftentimes additional light is required whether it’s through your camera’s flash or other lighting units.

Faster shutter speeds work great for sports photography. With the right amount of lighting and a quick shutter speed, you can freeze and athlete in motion during an impressive play.

You can capture equally stellar photos by slowing your shutter speed down. In this way you can pan with your moving subject (that is move your camera along with the subject), thus blurring everything but the subject you pan with in your image. This can be a little tricky because you will need to move your camera in sync with your subject, but the image very accurately captures the speed at which your subject is moving.

Another fun use for a slow shutter speed is to capture light. I don’t just mean sunlight or the light from your flash, but to capture light as your subject like when photographing fireworks, sparklers, traffic lights, etc. When you were a kid did you ever right your name with sparklers on the fourth of July? Well with a long exposure you can actually see your fiery words in print. You can  create the same kind of impressions with the lights on cars and a long exposure or just dancing around a darkened room with a flashlight and your camera set to a slow shutter speed. There are some pretty awesome images out there that are created by using this method.

Well I hope you have found this article on your camera’s shutter speed helpful, and maybe you even found some new fun things you would like to try out. The next article I post will focus on your aperture settings and the effect they have on your images.

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