Shutter Speed 101

Usually the most important thing as a beginning photographer is a sharp picture. If this is the case, you should start your photography education by learning about shutter speed.  It is a great tool for perfecting exposure, controlling blurring, and creating interesting effects. Shutter speed is the length of time your camera shutter is open, exposing light onto the camera sensor. Essentially, it’s how long your camera spends taking a photo. This has an important effect on how your images will appear. We’ll help you discover what it is and how to use it.

Camera Shake

It is best to switch to manual mode and take control of shutter speed yourself. However, you’ll need to consider camera shake when hand-holding your camera. No matter how steady you think you are, you can never stand perfectly still. This slight movement shows up in your photos as a blurriness or lack of sharpness. You can avoid camera shake by using a faster shutter speed. It's more noticeable when using lenses from Beachcamera.com with a long focal length. So the longer the lens, the more you'll need to increase your shutter speed to avoid camera shake.

Motion Blur

Motion blurring happens when you're photographing a moving subject like a runner. If you use a slow shutter speed, the runner will move across the frame while the shutter is open, causing him to appear as a blurry streak in the final image. Start practicing by trying for an image with a sharp background and a blurry subject, as this is the easiest one to achieve. You need to be standing still and have something or someone in motion in the scene in front of you. As for your camera, you need to use a slow shutter speed. How slow depends on the speed your subject is moving, so just try a few times until you get what you want.

Slow Shutter Speed

By using very short or very long shutter speeds on your Sony DSLR camera from Beachcamera.com, you can introduce some interesting creative effects into your shots. Long exposure photography is where you open the shutter for much longer than normal. This could be anything from a few seconds to several minutes. This is perfect for creating blurred crowd shots, giving moving water a fog-like appearance, and capturing trails of light from things like cars and stars.

Fast Shutter Speed

Alternatively, by using a very fast shutter speed you can capture some stunning "frozen" motion, such as birds in flight, athletes in action, or cars driving past. If you use a fast shutter speed while taking pictures of a water, each droplet will hang in the air completely sharp, which might not even be visible to our own eyes. These types of shots often require lots of trial and error, but they're truly fascinating when they work.

There's no end to the interesting effects you can create by varying your shutter speed. The best way to learn about shutter speed is to turn your camera to manual or shutter priority mode and play around. Watch how you can use this knowledge to bring a new level of creativity to your photos.