Fast shutter Speed & Slow shutter Speed

A Slow shutter speed setting allows a greater amount of light to enter, and a Fast shutter speed setting reduces the amount of light. Changing your camera’s shutter speed is one way to adjust the overall exposure of an image. But it also has creative uses, allowing you to control the amount of motion blur (or lack of it) in your images.

The slower the shutter speed, the more motion blur your camera will capture when shooting fast-moving subjects. With long shutter speeds from two to 30 seconds, any movement in the image will blur. This can create a cool effect with landscapes and the sky, as water and clouds turn soft and streaky.

When we take a picture, the camera’s shutter opens to allow light to reach the recording medium, where an an image is created. By controlling how long the shutter stays open, we can control what the resulting image looks like.

What is shutter speed in photography? Infographic explanation

Also known as ‘exposure time’, shutter speed is measured in seconds or fractions of a second (tenths, hundredths, or thousands). For example, a slow shutter speed of 1/2 means the shutter remains open for half a second, while a faster speed of 1/2000 means it only remains open for one-two-thousandth of a second.

Useful Shutter Speeds for daily interactions

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.

Muybridge’s work consisted of pioneering chrono photography of animal locomotion (between 1878 and 1886), which used multiple cameras to capture the different positions in a stride; and for his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting painted motion pictures from glass discs that predated the flexible perforated film strip.

Doc Edgerton

Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton, also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device.

By 1931, Edgerton had developed a system of stroboscopic light to achieve amazingly sharp high-speed photographs, as well as multi-shot photographs to freeze different stages of a single movement on a single photogram, and the same year he obtained a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT.

Edgerton revolutionized photography, science, military surveillance, Hollywood filmmaking, and the media through his invention of the strobe light in the early 1930s.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory.

His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures has garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work.

Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death.

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Stern Woodman was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring either herself or female models. Many of her photographs show women, naked or clothed, blurred, merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured.

Many of her photographs show women, naked or clothed, blurred (due to movement and long exposure times), merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured.

My plan to achieve Shutter Speed images inspired by Francesca Woodman

There are many creative ways to achieve Shutter Speed when taking photographs. Since I am at school and have a limited amount of resources to produce these “Fast and Slow” Shutter speeds, I will be doing the following…