 How's it? How's it guys? Today we are talking about the secrets of shutter speed and how you can use shutter speed in your photographs correctly. Now Aputure gets all the plaudits for being the one thing that separates the so-called happy snapper from the professional photographer, but it's shutter speed. Shutter speed is the thing that I believe you want to understand and master if you really want to take your photographs and make them memorable. The reason behind this is that as normal people, we can replicate the effect of Aputure just by squinting and doing things like that, but we can't do the same with shutter speed. We can't stand in one place for 10 minutes and see the effect of all of the clouds that have passed by our eyes in one single image. And we certainly can't see, like this photograph here, the birth of a nuclear explosion captured at one 10 billionth of a second. We're going to start at the ultra-long exposures. Now the longest exposure ever recorded was eight years, which is this photograph on screen, but that's obviously an awful long time. I don't think we anybody's going to wait around eight years for a photograph. But Chris McCall in his book Sunburn creates photographs of the sun transversing across the sky over hours, sometimes a whole day. And that sun, as it leaves its fingerprints on the paper negatives that he puts inside his camera, physically burns a hole in the negative to create these ethereal, almost alien looking images. And that's the key here, that word alien. It's a world that we can sort of recognize, but it's not the world we inhabit. The same with the, the long exposures are so beloved of landscape photographers, you know, when the sea and the sky or waterfall or something becomes not a collection of water, just, you know, just moving around, but a quiet, smooth, milky surface that has had all the edges flattened off because of that long exposure. And because of that feeling, I find that these photographs have a very quiet, calm sort of effect on me. This is highlighted by having something static to contrast that motion against within the frame. The power station photographs of Michael Kenner illustrates point beautifully, you know, the cooling towers are there, you know that this is a place of industry. And yet, because that steam and the evaporation has been allowed to play all over the surface of the film for a protracted length of time, that it becomes soft and gentle. Like a wispy ectoplasm that is wrapping itself like a calming blanket around these images. It's a quirk that the longer the exposure, the less sense of motion, certainly from my perspective, there is within there. But when you have a slightly shorter, relatively speaking, exposure, and you introduce figures into it, then you get a very different feel to the image. It becomes not calm, but almost like the echo of ghosts. And in fact, Alexei Titorenko's, and I hope I pronounced that correctly, Book the City of Shadows, is a prime example of this. That these photographs of subway stations, again, can you see how there is a solid static entity within these photographs to contrast against the movement? But because it's a relatively shorter exposure, the hand occasionally is captured because it stood long enough static to register as an actual hand, a foot, a shoulder. This gives these photographs a very different feel, doesn't it, to the ones that we looked at those long exposures. Try it sometime. This is something that is well within the grasp of any photographer to get yourself like a neutral density filter sticking in front of that. That increases the length of exposure that you're able to create. Again, a tripod and see what happens. See what ghosts can be put onto your images. I want you to understand there is so much that you can do with shutter speeds that you shouldn't just rely on this idea that, you know, shutter speeds are only there to make sure that your image is sharp, right? You must do sharpnesses beyond or everything else. If you do want sharpness, then fine, use the fastest shutter speed you can possibly get. Then you are making sure that you're eliminating camera shake and subject blur and all that kind of stuff. But feel free to throw off these shackles and just do your own thing, man. Just get there and play with it. This is the joy of photography that you can find things to experiment with and check things out. So going back to Ernst Haas and his cars and things of that nature, this is where, yes, you start to see more of an idea of motion. Because the objects, unlike those long exposures, are more recognizable. We kind of get the feeling from them. They impart within us a franticness that is there. Look at the swimming shot. You can almost hear the snap of the starter's gun and everybody splashing. The water's going everywhere and stuff like that. And it's this crazy outpouring of energies. I used to love photographic dancers within the studio because dance, for me, is not the single upon points frozen in time. But it's more a series of things. Dance is not a static expression. Dance is a motion. And I wanted to convey that with my photographs. And sometimes I could do that by using a relatively short shutter speed, maybe a quarter of a second, something like that. And sometimes it would be required to have a longer shutter speed, maybe half a second, a second or something. But it's about understanding the motion, the idea that you want to convey through your image. But you don't need to go crazy sometimes. Just a little bit is also sufficient. When you are photographing, you know, somebody or a girl with long hair or something, and you want to make the image just feel a little bit more lifelike, that it has a little bit more soul to it. Little bits of movement when introduced, you know, flick of the hair or something like that, can just take that photograph up a little bit. That it's like you have just breathed some life across the print. And it makes the person go, do you know what, this isn't just like a static image. This is a living, breathing person. Because of these subtle little signs of motion, of movement that you've introduced to make the photograph feel alive. Of course, with all of this, there is a bit of a caveat. And if you're not a native English speaker, then caveat just kind of is a fancy way of saying that there is a disclaimer about all of these shutter speeds. You know, shutter speed, like everything else in photography, has a bunch of rules attached to it. And I'll tell you, you need to sort of photograph certain things and certain speeds. But it all depends. It depends on the relative motion of the thing moving. Look at those photographs of Alexei Titorenko just then, right? Those people are not really moving that fast. So that's why they kind of register on the film. But if you wanted to create a motion of a tortoise, for example, you would need to have an extremely long shutter speed because, relatively speaking, once again, because the tortoise is moving slowly. Whereas, look at these cars from Ernst Haas. They're moving fairly quickly. So this shutter speed is actually relatively fast. These are all just suggestions. And that's what I want you to understand is it's not so much the specific shutter speed that you're looking for. It's the ideas, the feeling that you can create in your photographs by exploring the ideas at the longest shutter speeds, at the shorter shutter speeds. It's giving you a place to get started with your own experimentation. I think in all the genres of photography, you know, sports photography is probably the one that illustrates all the options that you have that we've discussed so far about shutter speed. And we haven't really touched upon one aspect of shutter speed. And that is to bring impact into a photograph. Now, when you freeze motion by using a fast, again, relatively fast shutter speed, where the thing is stopped just at the point of maximum event-ness, what Henry Carchibre saw what he called not maximum event-ness, but the decisive moment, then the mind looks and because it just finish it, just get it there. And we are drawn to this thing. You want the finger to touch just, you know, like Michelangelo and this thing with the, you know, the Sistine Chapel, we want those fingers to touch. That's why we look at these photographs of great events that are frozen just at the peak of that moment where we are drawn to them. They have that impact. We can see the sinews of a person, the effort that is conveyed because they are engaging with us. And our eyes can walk all over and see the strain, but at the same time, we can see a world that we can't see with our eyes. If you think about, you know, the image of, it starts with the swimmers and the franticness that was going on there. Now, you contrast this image by Tim Clayton of that swimmer just breaking the surface of the water. In fact, not breaking it is right. There's the moment before the meniscus. I think if that's the correct word, shatters and the head burst through the water. It is a moment that we cannot see with our eyes and because it again looks so bizarre and yet so recognizable. That photograph will stay with you tomorrow, a week from now, something like that. It will linger within your mind. This is the joy, again, of going to those extremes of pushing out to the edges, like the outer limits of the shutter speed and seeing what is inhabited there. Much like, you know, there's nuclear bombs that were photographed by a camera, which I need to just check here because I've written it down because I'm absolutely terrible at remembering. It's the Rappatronic camera, which was developed by Dr. Harold. And again, I forgot, I'm going to go return to my notes here. Dr. Harold Egerton, right? He of the exploding apples, bananas and cards and all that kind of stuff. Those are cameras that were built specifically to capture physics at work. To show us things we could never see. I want you to stop thinking of shutter speeds as simply this thing that freezes motion or it doesn't, what have you, but more as a vital tool in your photographic arsenal to employ, to create a feeling, a reaction within somebody. Make conscious choices within your photographs to employ shutter speed as a creative tool because it is there for you to play with. Aperture gets all that plaudit. But be the photographer who isn't just reliant on what is essentially kind of sort of like a one-trick pony thing, that if you shoot wide open, you're a pro. If you understand how to wander around the speed dial and create long, calm, ghostly images or freeze motion, freeze action at that point where it just wants to just get over the line, then then you are far more pro. Then you've got the tools to really start to express yourself and then of course you can use those in conjunction with aperture. Aperture has its place, of course, but be a rounded photographer. Be the photographer who finds their own way. Who uses shutter speed like a boss because you can. Don't worry about the rules. Get rid of the rules, it doesn't matter. But if you do want to learn about how to at least understand, like you have understood about shutter speed now, go check this photo, go check this video here, right, about aperture. Thank you ever so much for watching and I will see you again soon.