What is Shutter Speed in Digital Photography?

Shutter Speed is simply the speed with which the shutter of your camera shuts down. Ashutter is a way again to control the amount of light that you allow to enter your camera. A faster shutter speed will close your camera quickly and thus allowing lesser light to enter and for a slower speed you will get more light and hence a brighter picture.

Having said this, you need to first understand what happens when some object is moving. When an object moves, basically for every single minute position change that it undergoes, we can have a new image. Now if you try and take a picture of all those different positions that the object takes while moving on a single photograph, it would look hazy/blurry. It is sometimes desirable but undesirable most of the times. Now coming back to our shutter speed, If you keep your shutter speed slow, then you are keeping your photographic sensor exposed to longer time and so, allowing all the images that are formed during the movement of the object to appear on a single photograph. This gives a blurry image for a moving object.

It is therefore advised to have a very high shutter speed to capture moving objects in still mode. A high speed shutter closes in a fraction of second and so it captures just one position taken by the mobile object. However, sometimes we want to have Blurry image in which case we need to have slower shutter speeds.

Look at this falling fruit. First image is taken at higher shutter speed and the second one at a lower shutter speed. Note: Blurry effect and Still photography

Another important thing about shutter speed is that, since with slower speeds, you are allowing more light to enter your sensor, so even if it is a dark area, the sensor is exposed to it for longer time. So, atleast a few light rays will surely strike the sensor and so you can have an image brighter than normal photoshoot. However make sure your camera does not move during this time if you want a still image. This stabilization of camera can be achieved through an accesssory called Tri-pod.

From next article onwards, we will be moving to some Higher concepts in Digital Photography.

For further explanation regarding anything related to Shutter Speed, its settings, types and any practical problems, just leave a comment below and i will try my best to elaborate it here itself.

Cheers,

Kumar