In your camera, three main parameters, you've got shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. We're going to start by talking about shutter speed. The thing is that all three of these things work together to create your exposure. But we need to understand each one's individual contribution to the exposure before we can tie them all together. So shutter speed has to do with how fast or how long your shutter which is the depending on the camera, a mechanical curtain in front of the sensor, or maybe in a mirrorless camera. It's how long the sensor stays exposed for but either way it performs the same function no matter how it physically takes place.

It's how long that stays open for and shutter speed is expressed in seconds. And oftentimes most photographs are taken in fractions of a second. So you may see a shutter speed at one 60th or 100 or 120 400 Anything like that 2500 actually, and that is how long it stays on the so it's usually not very long unless you hear of somebody doing a long exposure, in which case you be having the shutter stay open for multiple seconds, sometimes even minutes or hours for Astro photography and things like that. So I have an analogy for you, that may help you understand how the shutter works. So if you think of a barrel outside like a big trash barrel, and it's got a cover on it, basically in a rainstorm as the rains coming down, the amount of time that you take the cover off that barrel is how is your shutter speed.

So if you have a very quick shutter speed, then you take that cover off and you put it right back on, are you going to collect a lot of rain in that barrel? Not so much. But if you took that cover off and you waited an hour, and then you came back and you put it back on, you're going to have a pretty significant amount of water in that barrel. Now in that analogy, the water is light and the cover of the barrel The shutter speed or the shutter itself. So if you think about it like that, the longer your shutter stays open, the more light you're going to collect onto your sensor or film if you're shooting film. So how does shutter affect our exposure, the slower our shutter speed, the brighter our exposure is going to be because we're letting more light come in because we're allowing it to stay open longer.

Now, shutter speed also affects something else in our photograph, and that is motion blur. So as that shutter stays open, if it stays open for multiple seconds, let's think about how much can happen in a few seconds in a photograph. If I'm having my picture taken. I'm rocking back and forth like this. And that shutter stays open for three seconds. That's 123.

So I just went back and forth a handful of times in that three seconds. As the camera is recording me. over those three seconds. I'm going to look like a ghost. You're going to see trends Lucent, images of me from here to here. Now if the shutter speed is say, for instance, one 300 and 20th of a second, or let's even say, one 1,000th of a second.

So one millisecond, if I'm going back and forth like this, that shutter is going to open and close like this. So it doesn't matter where I am or how I'm moving, that shutter is going to freeze my action because it's so quick. Now there's varying degrees of this. Obviously, if you have a very fast moving subject, say for instance, a train that speeding by you're going to need a pretty fast shutter speed to freeze that motion. If you're photographing a still life scene, maybe you're doing product photography, and you're using natural light, well, you can leave the shutter open for five seconds, it doesn't matter because your subjects not going to move. So it's very dependent on the situation.

But understanding how the shutter contributes to motion blur will help you choose animation. A shutter speed for what you're photographing. There are other contributions to this effect, such as your focal length of your lens. So, when shooting with a longer focal length, such as maybe 200 millimeters and you're very zoomed in, your shutter speed is going to have to be higher, so that the effects of your hands moving is minimized. So when you shoot with a very wide lens, the amount of motion that your lens sees from your hands is going to be less than when you're extremely zoomed in. If you've ever used binoculars to look at a bird hundreds and hundreds of feet away, and you put those binoculars to your eyes, you know that as you move just a little bit, there's a big movement in the image that you see through the binoculars.

But that movement is going to be minimized as that focal length decreases. So the same thing happens with long lenses and short lenses. So good rule of thumb, just as a starting point. And this is irrespective of what your subject is. A good rule of thumb for handheld is that you want to be two times your focal length. So one over two times your focal length.

So for instance, if you're shooting with a 50 millimeter lens, then you want your shutter speed to be generally, a minimum of 150 times two is 101. Over 100 is your shutter speed. Now this does vary depending on the shooters, stillness, other hands, I don't have very still hands so I kind of have to abide by that rule. There are some people that can be very steady and still and they can cheat a little bit and get slower shutter speeds at those focal lengths. But that's just a starting point. There's other things too, like your some lenses have stabilization.

Some bodies have stabilization inside, and that's going to let you shoot at slower shutter speeds. But in general, with regular lenses with no stabilization and Average shaky hands like I've probably got one over two times the focal length is what your shutter speed should be at a minimum, and there's nothing to say that you can't have a faster shutter speed, it's not going to hurt you there, it's gonna actually help. So that's shutter speed. And like I said before, it's going to also play hand in hand with aperture, and ISO are going to talk about those in the next modules, and then we'll tie everything together. So when quick review, shutter speed, the longer it's open, the more light it lets in. The shorter it's open, the less light it lets in.

Shutter speed contributes to motion blur. If you have your shutter open for a long time, then you're going to be more susceptible to motion blur. When you have fast moving subjects, you need to have a faster shutter speed. When you have a longer lens you also need to have a faster shutter speed to avoid motion blur. So that's shutter speed. Let's check out aperture