So the next thing we need to have a look at is the shutter speed and the shutter speed is controlled by the shutter and I've included a little image here to help you to see. This actually is a mechanical device in the camera. And what it essentially does is it sits in front of the sensor and it opens and closes. And the longer it opens and close, the more light lets in and the shorter the left light. One thing we need to remember is a fast shutter that freezes motion. But a slow shutter is going to take a photograph of all the motion in between.
So shutter speed is very, very important. If you want to freeze motion, we can use it artistically. to blur motion as well. So if we're going to take sports photography or action photography, this lever is the one that's most important. And one 8,000th of a second is our fastest and then we go up. So if we want to take a fast moving picture, we want to be shooting at one 1,000th, for instance, or one 2004 is really fast, even higher.
But the problem is that as we pull that lever down, we lose an exposure. So something else has to come up to compensate what never free leavers has to compensate for that exposure adjustment. So, we might pull the lever down, and we keep pulling it down to maybe 2000. And we find our exposure is coming down. And then to get that back up, we might need to To put up the aperture, or we might need to increase the ISO to compensate and bring us back to an exposure. So a fast shutter freezes motion that's going to take us down to the beginning and a slow shutter is going to blur motion.
So let's have a look a couple of images where the shutter speed is being used, that lever is being pulled down and then up to create different effects. Now in this image, we can see the dog is frozen in action right in mid action. And the reason it's been frozen that way is because a fast shutter speed was used. So if you're taking pictures of sports or kids running around or dogs running around or birds or anything that flying, you're going to want to fast shutter speed and then the lights going to come in, in such a short space of time. One 8,000th of a second, but really, really fast stuff. Typically, you want to be one 1000 and above if you're trying to freeze motion, so we're going to pull that lever down if we want to freeze the dog.
Now this one is interesting what's happened his most poor camera and a tripod. So the cameras fixed and they've got a small aperture, but I probably shot this on about f 22. And the way I can tell that is because all those little lights look like stars. That's telling me the aperture is very, very small. The reason I've done that is because they want to get a deep depth of field. We're going to talk about that a little bit later.
But what they've done is they've opened up the shutter speed. So they've stopped up on the shutter speed. They're probably gone too. Five seconds, something like that on this exposure and that's caught the light of the cars moving along and it's dragged them out and this is called a long exposure, we would use the shutter speed lever to create this effect we would leave the shutter open for longer, it would hold the light coming in for longer and now we've created a very artistic effect. So that's another way we would use our shutter speed