Shutter Speed Tips for Photography

Photography has a lot to do with your artistic and creative skills. Taking great photos requires a good eye and great ideas. But photography also is a large amount skill and technical oriented as well. One of the important aspects of technical and skill photography is the shutter speed. If you can have great artistic and technical skills you can be a very good photographer and take some really nice pictures.

It is important to know how to use shutter speed properly in any type of photography as long as it isn’t point and shoot. Controlling your shutter speed will give you very precise control over your image. The shutter speed is a device in the camera that will control the amount of light that is let into the camera for exposing the image. You can expose light to the image very long for a long shutter speed or fast for fast speeds.

A fast shutter speed would be something like one over a thousand or 1/1000. This is measured in F stops. This number controls the amount of light that is let into the camera for exposure. A very fast shutter speed like the one above would usually be used for very bright locations. If this shutter speed was used in a dark room the picture would be very dark.

Shutter speed will also affect how your subject and photograph looks. A fast shutter speed will take the photograph very fast and literally freeze the image. If you are taking a picture of a waterfall the details of the water will all be captured. If, on the other hand, you took the same exact picture with a slow shutter speed the waterfall will become blurred as it is moving and the slow shutter speed is exposing the image while it is moving.

To create a fast shutter speed that freezes the image use shutter speeds like 1/1000 or faster. This fast shutter speed is very convenient for fast action and events. You can use this shutter speed for sports, birds flying, and people running. Fast shutter speeds can also be used for less obvious reasons such as when taking pictures of young infants and children. These subjects tend to move around a lot and are very excited. Having a fast shutter speed will prevent any blurs that can be created from their movement.

Slow shutter speeds can also be used with actions as well. If you take a picture of fast motion with a slow shutter speed like 1/60 the motion will be somewhat blurred depending on how fast the object in motion is going.

A very important part of shutter speed control is the aperture. Both work very closely together to create the right exposure. If the aperture is off the image can be incorrectly exposed. When using shutter speed try going in the shutter priority mode. That will make you have total control over the shutter speed without worrying about the aperture. The aperture will be automatically set by the camera.

Not all cameras let you manually control the shutter speed. If you want to control your shutter speed be sure to get an SLR camera. Some non SLR cameras can let you control shutter speed manually but SLR is really the best option.

You can use shutter speed very creatively when taking photos. Shutter speed also is very important to know about if you are serious about taking photos. Not knowing how to use shutter speed is like an architect not knowing how to measure in the metric system.

Al Sanchez has a great program that teaches you how to take better photos. He also teaches people how to sell photos online.