Shutter Control
F-Stop, shutter speed and aperture are the things that are going to be the most important to your photographs. We will explore these concepts through the next few articles.
If you are using a camera you have probably heard these terms, but do you know what they mean and how to utilize them to your advantage? Once upon a time I did, but when I got my first digital camera with all of its automatic settings, I forgot everything I learned about these terms in college. Fortunately, I still have my old college text book to help refresh my memory... my pack rat ways have finally paid off!
To start, I took a peek at my point and shoot camera and, as far as I could tell, they don’t allow you to really control changing the shutter speed or the aperture. When you change your settings to the images like the flower, the mountains, or the star, the camera automatically sets these things for you. No problems. On the other hand, DSLR cameras give you the freedom to point and shoot with automatic settings or manually adjust to your own preferences. You can even set the camera so it won’t do your focusing for you.
Shutter speed controls “the amount of light by the length of time shutter remains open.” Doubling the amount of time the shutter is open gives one more “stop” of exposure to the film. To do the opposite, or go back one stop, means that you have cut the time that the shutter is open in half. Digital single lens reflex cameras don’t use a mechanical shutter for capturing images, instead, they have a sensor chip that turns on and off for the same amount of time that a shutter would be open.
So how does this shutter speed affect the photos that you take? It depends on what you are photographing. If you are photographing something that is moving fast, you want a fast shutter speed. Something slow does better with a slower speed.
The following 2 photos of the water coming out of my slip and slide show how the change in shutter speed can affect the image.
The first photo was taken at a fast shutter speed ( 1/1000 of a second or f-10), so it captured the individual droplets.
