Shutter and Motion

To avoid or underexposing your image light is on of the most important aspects to consider when taking a photo. There are three things that effect 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 exposures when the shutter curtain remains open for more than 1/30 of a second. The shutter curtain on ealycameras remained open exposing the plate to light for a long time. The earliest images required an exposure time of around twenty minutes, but by the1840's it had been reduced to about 20 seconds. 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 created this experiment by taking ur own long exposure portraits. We used Photoshop to blend our image with a silver plate texture and convert to black and white.

Today the senses in our cameras don't require such a long exposure times, but long exposures are sometimes still necessary in lowlight environments. For the same reason we had to sit still for our long exposure portraits it is important to understand that a long exposure affects motion blur. This can led to creative results such as our light painting photos where we had to sit in a pitch black room and have the shutter curtain open for about twenty seconds in order to capture where the light goes.

A short exposure is useful where there is a lot of light available, such as daylight, stoplights,beach, or snow. The effect of a short exposure is freezing the actions. This is great for animal photography, sports photography taking photos of children and things that are moving quickly. This can lead to creative results such as When dropping berries into milk. We used short exposure in order to capture the moment the berries hit the milk and splashed.