What effects does changing the shutter speed have?

• Shutter speed controls the appearance of movement in the image.
• It is chosen primarily when you want to depict motion, when you are taking photographs of moving things.
• When the shutter is fired, whatever happens in the shot in the time the shutter is open is recorded on to the sensor or film.
• If you have chosen a very fast shutter speed, only a split second of the movement will be captured, resulting is a crisp, sharp, frozen shot of the movement at that precise moment.
• If you have chosen a very slow shutter speed a lot of movement will be recorded. Whatever was moving in the image will be a blur – the more time the shutter was open for the more blurry the movement will appear.
• Using slow shutter speeds does come with its problems. As stated above, a slow shutter speed captures all the movement in the image; well likewise if your camera is moving, it also captures this.
• This is called camera shake. Your hands are not steady enough to hold the camera still when taking the photo.
• As a general rule anything over 1/60s (a sixtieth of a second) – you can hand hold your camera without having to use a tripod.
• With anything between 1/30s (a thirtieth of a second) and 1/60s, you will experience some camera shake.
• Anything lower than 1/30s you will have to use a tripod if you want your images to be sharp.

• Shutter speed is the length of time the shutter is open
• The shorter the shutter is open the less light gets in.
• The longer the shutter is open the more light gets in
• This is referred to as fast and slow shutter speeds.
• Shutter speed can vary from a fast shutter speed of 1/4000s (four-thousandths of a second) down to a slow shutter speed of 30 seconds (shows as 30” on your camera)
• Some cameras also have a ‘bulb’ setting, which allows the shutter to be open for as long as your finger is held on the button taking the picture. This can be up to hours and hours if you wish.

Here are some examples from this task.

Here is a diagram on how to set up your shot to photograph the pretty patterns that appear from oil on water. The important part of taking these photos is to get as close in to the oil and water as possible, focusing on the oil drops and letting the background blur out nicely. Using a large aperture will give you a nice shallow depth of field, and choose bright colours to make the backgrounds stand out.

Here are some of the results of the water droplets. The blue colour came from setting my white balance to Tungsten.

I taught a class last night on how to photograph water droplets. Here is a diagram that shows how it was done. For the droplet to be completely frozen the flash should be turned down to its lowest setting 1/128. This will make the flash fire for a shorter duration allowing the drop to be frozen. The shutter speed really doesn’t matter for this task as it is the flash that freezes the motion. The shutter speed will only affect the ambient light which you want to try and eliminate. I used a speed of 1/60, but anything under 1/250 (flash sync speed) will be fine. I used my lowest ISO (less noise) and an aperture of f.8. This gives a nice clear image and makes the whole droplet in focus.

The flash should be fired at the background, this makes the surface of the water reflect whatever is on the background meaning that you cant see though the water to the base of your tray. To change the colours of your image you could either change the colour of the background, add food colouring to the water, or change your white balance settings (this is what I did).

Depth of field
Depth of field (dof) is a term used to describe how much of the image is in focus
A small depth of field is when only a small part of the image is sharp, any objects that are further away, or closer to the camera than the point focused on, will be out of focus and blurry.
A large depth of field is when a large amount of the image is in focus, from the objects in the foreground to the objects in the distance.
DOF is controlled partly by the aperture
A small aperture like f16 gives a large depth of field (lots in focus)
A large aperture like f2.8 gives a small depth of field (small area of the image in focus)
Depth of field is also affected by the distance from the camera to the subject.
The closer the camera is to the subject the shallower the depth of field and visa versa.
It is also affected by zoom, the more zoomed in you are, the shallower the depth of field and visa versa.

Aperture
Aperture is the size of the opening in the lens when the picture is taken
-The larger the hole, the more light gets in.
-The smaller the hole the less light gets in.
But the tricky (and annoying) bit, is that a small hole is represented by a big number such as f16, and a large hole is represented by a small number such as f2.8

Exposure
Exposure is the amount of light that hits your cameras sensor creating your picture.
this amount of light can be controlled by three things:

Aperture:    the size of the opening of the lens when the picture is taken
Shutter speed: the amount of time that the shutter is open
ISO:    the sensitivity of the digital sensor (or film)

These three things always have to work together, as changing one will affect the others. Each of these three things also create their own individual aesthetic effect when altered.