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Beginner's Guide to Manual Photography
Shutter Speed
The first of the three settings I'll be covering in this article is shutter speed. I encourage you to follow along with your camera in Shutter priority mode. In fact, I'm writing this assuming that you're using Shutter priority mode. For the sake of keeping things as simple as possible, I'll just be discussing shutter speed on its own and save talking about the implications of all the various settings on one another until later in the article. The purpose of a camera's shutter is to precisely control the amount of time that light is captured by film or a digital sensor. Typical shutter speeds, as seen on a camera, are 1000, 500, 250, 125, 60, 30, 15, 8, 4, 2, 1", 2", 4", 8", 15", 30". These numbers represent fractions of a second, except for those followed by quotes, which represent whole seconds. So those numbers actually represent 1/1000, 1/500, 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, and 30 seconds respectively.
For example, if you are attempting to photograph a friend who is smiling and standing still, and you've got a steady hand, 1/30 could be sufficient (albeit less than ideal) to freeze the subject. On the other end of the spectrum, let's say you are standing on the sidelines of a race track. As one of the cars zooms past you, you could use a shutter speed such as 1/400 to ensure that the car isn't just a faded streak of color in your photo. There are times, however, when motion blur is desirable. I think most people have seen the distinctive shot of a busy roadway filled with red and white trails of light emanating from the cars' brake lights and headlights. This is what you might typically visualize when you think about intentional motion blur in photos. Speaking of which, if you don't know what unintentional motion blur is I will get to that shortly. Just like you can freeze motion with a wide range of shutter speeds, depending on the subject, you can achieve motion blur with what you might normally consider a reasonably fast shutter speed. For example, you could set the shutter speed to 1/100 while shooting a tennis player as they hit the ball on a serve and you would very likely get some degree of blur which conveys motion. Meanwhile, lets say you wanted to take the token busy roadway shot and you shoot at 1/30 or even 1", you'll find that while there is in fact blur, it won't be the dramatic look you probably hoped for. To pull off this shot I'd recommend using a much longer shutter speed (such as 10" or 30") so that you can catch several vehicles (in each direction) traveling the length of the frame so you don't have sudden ends to your blurry lines. Taking that a step further, unless you've got a series of gyros surgically implanted throughout your body, you will of course need a tripod at such slow shutter speeds or else you will have not only motion blur, but also just plain blurriness throughout, which leads me to my next point!
As a general rule of thumb, you should try to set your shutter speed to 1 / X (with X being focal length) or faster to avoid camera-shake. If you're not familiar with the term focal length, it is what determines your angle of view (wide/normal/telephoto) and it is measured in millimeters. If don't know what your focal length is, your camera's lens should display it somewhere, even if you have a small point-n-shoot. If you have a zoom lens it will show the available range and you may need to approximate your current focal length. So back to the matter at hand, if I'm taking a shot at full telephoto on my Canon 28-105mm zoom lens, I would want to use a shutter speed of 1/100 or faster.* *Please note that isn't taking into account the 1.6x field-of-view (FOV) crop on my Canon 20D, making the effective focal length at full telephoto 168mm instead of 105mm. So a shutter speed of 1/160 or 1/200 would really be ideal in that case. FOV crop is a bit beyond the scope of this article, however, so I will leave details about that for another article.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Common Manual Modes Page 3: Shutter Speed Page 4: Aperture Page 5: ISO (sensitivity) Page 6: The Big Picture 
Related Articles Add Comment
9 User Comments 1 - Posted by
Kurtis
on July 19, 2006 - 3:35 pm Digg this article: http://digg.com/hardware/Noob_s_guide_to_manual_ph... 2 - Posted by
jcmarney
on July 20, 2006 - 12:06 pm Good Read- One comment though. The Sunlight f/16 rule isn't going to work for digital for many cases. Small digicams simply don't close down to f/16, and DSLR's will often start degrading in quality due to diffraction. There is a good article to familiarize yourself with the effects of diffraction here: http://www.diglloyd.com/diglloyd/free/DigicamDiffr... 3 - Posted by
Kurtis
on July 20, 2006 - 12:32 pm Good point. I personally never use the sunny 16 rule, but thought it might be a helpful reference for some.
4 - Posted by
blackjet
on July 24, 2006 - 7:31 am hay kurtis, good article, enjoyed the read....now I just need a camera to try it all out!
5 - Posted by
ty_hot
on February 15, 2008 - 5:06 pm Good article! Thanks!
6 - Posted by
Dine
on February 19, 2009 - 11:30 am Great article for a beginner. The explanation with reference setting cleared lots of my doubts. Thanks
7 - Posted by
Shum
on July 1, 2009 - 2:36 am Very nice article!! Have u written more such articles?
8 - Posted by
Kurtis
on July 1, 2009 - 2:53 pm You might also be interested in these: http://www.thetechlounge.com/article/611/Beginners... http://www.thetechlounge.com/article/513/10-Things-I-Learned-With-my-First-DSLR/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/article/379/5-Things-... http://www.thetechlounge.com/article/308/10-Reasons-to-Buy-a-DSLR-Camera/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/article/312/10-Reason... 9 - Posted by
tomfeinerg
on August 20, 2009 - 9:48 am Great post, thanks!
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