 So if you guys ever wondered what makes photos look like this, you know, you have like these images of time lapses of roads and they kind of have like cars driving on them and you see all the lights sort of stringy and time lapsey to make up a word. Well, this all has to do with shutter speed, just like this next image right here. This is another example of shutter speed being used by a photographer to do something really cool. And in this case, it happens to be capturing this bullet in mid-flight. That's very cool. I mean, this has to be a very, very quick photo. So all of this, like I said, it's shutter speed. Now this brings up two important questions. First of all, what is shutter speed? And second of all, what determines the speed of the shutter and why do you pick one shutter speed over the other? Well, for example, we're going to start first by explaining what the shutter does and we're going to do it on this page because the next page I've got something kind of cool to show you. So the shutter is kind of like a window. And say just for imaginary's sake, let's just imagine that behind that is your film. So here you've got your film or your sensor and maybe imagine that these are connected and they're not next to each other. So your light is shining through your window, going on to your film. But usually in front of your window, maybe you have a shutter and that's your shutter right here. And imagine when you open that shutter, the light streams in and then you close the shutter and the light stops streaming in. And that's basically how film is developed. Light needs to fall upon the film and expose it so you can see what's going on outside of the camera. Otherwise, you can't see what's going on. And then it closes again. So you can't go forever. It has to only has a certain amount of time. It wants to just capture one tiny little instant of light. And that is all determined by the photographer and the camera and the meter and lots of other things. So this, but this shutter speed is really important for determining the look of your photograph. So if you're wondering, this image right here is an example of a high shutter speed. So high meaning fast. So this shutter goes click and it's open and closed and story is done. You've captured your bullet. You've captured your smoke flying everywhere and fire flying everywhere. Pretty exciting photo, right? And the photo before that is an example of a low shutter speed or a slow photograph. Now this image right here shows you an example of what those things look like if you were to put them all sort of right next to each other. This is actually three separate pictures that have been stitched together into one by some guy on Wikipedia who I think did a pretty cool job of explaining shutter speed with this image. So let's just imagine that this shutter speed right here is 1,500th of a second. And maybe this one right here is a 30th of a second and this one right here is a quarter of a second. So even a quarter of a second, that's pretty fast. I mean, a second is a pretty long time but a quarter of a second is a little, a lot less. A 30th of a second is pretty fast and a 500th of a second is very fast. And actually if you add some more zeros behind this you get into some shutter speeds that now exist these days with digital cameras that are pretty amazing. But a 500th of a second is pretty good for capturing action. So imagine that this little Daisy Wheel here is spinning and in that 500th of a second it has moved so little that it looks like it's standing still. It looks exactly like it's standing still because you've captured it's moving. It's that shutter speed is so quick. But in the 30th of a second you can see that during the time that the shutter was open so the shutter goes open and the Daisy Wheel keeps moving and then click the shutter closes over here. So in that time this little arm of the Daisy Wheel has moved away and that motion is then captured in blur. That's just the color or sort of the impression because the light is falling off of it and each one of those little thousandths of a second between when the shutter opens and closes and it's landing on the film or on the sensor. And in the quarter of a second shot it's going even further. It's going a lot further actually and so it goes shutter opens here and then it's kind of the Daisy Wheel travels and travels and travels and then stop click photo is done. So it's traveled quite a lot longer. You can see it's traveled so long that the colors have started to mix. And so that's just the principle. Why the shutter speed captures the motion that happens while it is open. And that can that generally comes in the form of some sort of blurred motion. It can come in other forms too and generally it's in some sort of movement of the object. Now old shutter speeds back in the day were shutter speeds were determined by springs. There used to be all these springs inside of cameras and kind of like ding ding ding. You pulled the spring so tight and it would make the shutter go so fast and you pulled a little tighter and it would go faster. And over time the system developed itself in the way that each shutter speed back and on the traditional scale was either twice as fast or half as fast. So basically let's start with a thousandth of a second. That's the fastest image you could have taken with this camera back then. And they determined then we'll make a 500th underneath that which is one half. So that's one half the speed. Now it goes down in that pattern all the way down until you get to hear where the math gets a little funny. But that's not exactly a half. It's kind of like sort of a half. But basically as you're moving down the shutter speeds are cutting themselves in half allowing twice as much light in. So a 500th of a second allows twice as much light in as a thousandth of a second if everything else on the camera stays the same. Which we'll talk about that in the exposure lesson a little later. Now let's talk really quickly about some different shutter speeds that you can use for different situations. So we're going to be talking here about freezing motion. And this is really important for if you're out there shooting and you want to make sure that your images are clear and that your people aren't moving in them and things like that. So we're going to list off some here. Two, one, 25. Got one, two, 50th. One, 500th. And a thousandth. So let's start with a 30th. And I would say if you're a beginner photographer I would say leave this to professionals or for emergencies. This shutter speed when you get down below a 30th of a second things get really slow and you're taking really slow photos and any kind of motion blur anything like that is going to come up in your photos. So you want to make sure don't go quite that low when you're first starting out. Once you get a little more experience you're welcome to it. But now if you're out taking just sort of daily photos of things that aren't moving so we call them still life so still life portraits or even portraits of people. You can take a still life photo a 60th of a second with most lenses just fine. And I would say once you get above a hundredth of a second you can start using that for daily shots. That's just kind of like regular things people walking moving around but not too quickly. You'll see an example of that just a little bit here. A great all around speed is 250th of a second. So for most daily situations if you can you know and you want to freeze your motion you don't want to make some artistic sort of blurry photos. 250th is a great place to start trying out all around photography. 500th is so sort of for motion shots and so fast motion shots sort of people doing athletics and things like that that don't require too much moving. And then you've got a thousandth of a second for fast motion shot. So you've got someone maybe running by you on a track or something like that really quickly or maybe you're trying to capture a race car perfectly still without any motion. You can try about a thousandth of a second. So you can see here these are all different speeds and you'll understand them once you go out and play with your camera a little bit but just wanted to give you a general introduction. Now sometimes you're going to want to let that blur happen. I was out walking the other day in Berlin and I saw this water fountain and I thought oh I have a lesson coming up about shutter speed I want to make sure these guys have an example. So I took a really quick example here example shot and I have one here that is taken at one four hundredth of a second and I've got one that is taken at a 30th of a second and I'm guessing you can already guess which one was at a 30th of a second and you can see that in that four hundredth of a second this water but droplet here did not move very far it's pretty much captured it perfectly still and in this one the water droplets were moving really quickly and you can see that I'm catching each one I mean they're moving at the same speed but I'm capturing them more slowly so in that 30th of a second you can see the water moved a lot further while the shutter was open than it did in the four hundredth of a second same thing goes for the hands right here this is a I went to a concert of a friend of mine Sam who's playing the drum here and you can see his hands are pretty well captured in this four hundredth of a second they're a little blurry if you look at the full version because his hands are moving really fast I probably should have taken them at about a thousand but in this small version of the picture you don't see the motion is bad here you've got one twenty fifth of a second and some of the pictures his hands are moving a little more but you can still see there's a little bit of motion blur there and even on this hand in the big version you can see that there's a little bit of motion blur and then here I've got one thirtyth of a second so you can add ones the tops of all of these numbers here you can see I've completely lost all detail in his hands and you can actually see his shirt through his hands his fingers haven't fallen off I guarantee but he is just moving so quickly that the camera is not picking up his fingers anymore and even this hand is a little blurry which was he was holding very still at that one moment so you can see here that there's a lot just a very big difference and how the camera perceives motion according to how quickly it's taking that photograph alright so this is an example of intentional blur and so when you're a photographer you have to kind of ask yourself the question do I want to make a static picture or do I want to make a dynamic picture and sometimes you know you kind of want to do both sometimes you want to do one or the other and this one right here would it be an example of a photographer saying I want to make a dynamic photograph and you can see here you can then see the motion of the water so he's taken this photograph probably around I would say a quarter of a second and at that shutter speed you just got light the light shining off of this beautiful scene here with water moving all over the place and it's really capturing that motion of that water this isn't fog that's just water sloshing all around inside of all these rocks it looks like fog but that's just kind of the effect that he was going for it's actually called sometimes the cotton candy effect when you are dealing with water and you're trying to make it look all blurry and cotton candy like so that's how you do that you move your shutter speed down to a quarter of a second and see how it looks you can also try panning and this was taken at about a 40th of a second someone was just taking a photograph of a chicken you can do this with your little brother if you would like to or your little sister make them run around in the yard while you take their picture you can also try that speeds are lower than a 40th or higher but basically the camera just follows the motion the viewer looked in the camera and they tried to keep that chicken's head right in the middle of the camera and they just followed them as they were running and snapped the photograph and in that time the camera moved a little ways the land moved away the chicken moved away but this head remains steady because that head wasn't moving at all so that's kind of a very cool example of this is called panning I'll write that out for you and I hope you can see that I'm running out of time here so I'm not going to correct it alright now here you can see an example of just a little bit of motion blur in a daily picture this photograph was taken at one hundred and twenty fifth of a second and you can just see that this this happens I thought it was acceptable for this photo to have a little bit of motion blur and that was kind of dark and cloudy so I kind of needed that motion but that's what it looks like here you can also see an example of what happens when the subject is moving across a big section of your sensor this person up front is a little closer than the person back here so he's moving on the on according to the sensor less than this person to the left and so you can see that this guy is more blurred than this guy right here so that your distance to your subject is going to affect your blurriness as well and their size in the viewfinder and this last image is just of motion blur you can see here I've kind of zoomed in this is actually a zoomed in version of this little section right here and I keep choosing the wrong dark colors and you can see here during the taking of this picture I moved the camera a little bit I didn't mean to I just kind of shook my hand and you can see that then the image this end image in the back is totally blurry and if you zoom in closely you can see why it's because the camera moved a little bit so that's the danger of having a low shutter speed that's why I advise you know messing around with less than a 30th of a second only when you kind of know what you're doing otherwise it'll get up get a lot of blurred images this image was taken at about a tenth of a second alright so that is your lesson about shutter speed I want you guys to go out there and mess around with all of them and try everything out and when you're ready come back to allversity.org and check out more videos