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You’ve been there before. You take a photo with your camera on auto mode, and the image pops ups on your LCD screen. You look at it and think, “huh…that doesn’t look right.” The image is too bright or too dark. The image that you were thinking in your head, was not the image that you captured.
When we’re talking about how dark or light a photo is, we’re referring to the exposure of an image. There are three main parts that make up the exposure, and are referred to as the exposure triangle.
It kind of sounds like high school geometry, right? Before you break out your protractor, pump the breaks. This is not a math lesson, I promise! There are formulas that can be used to talk about this material, but we’re going to keep this in terms that are intuitive.
The exposure triangle consists of your shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Think of these three things as a team. They work together to create the exposure of your image. If one of these settings changes, the other two settings also need to change to get that photo properly exposed. They all impact one another.
To get a better idea of what each of these settings do, let’s break down part of that triangle today. Shutter speed! Shutter speed is part of the team that is responsible for capturing or freezing movement AND impacts the overall exposure of your image. In this post, we’re going to talk about the roll shutter speed plays in exposure.
You know the “click” noise you hear when you take a photo? That is the camera’s shutter snapping shut! You can change the rate of speed on the shutter to be faster or slower.
When you hit the shutter button (or the big round button thing you use to take a photo), you’re opening up the camera shutter. Boom. You take the photo, and the shutter clicks shut. This process can happen in fractions of a second, or minutes. It all depends. Shutter speed is exactly that. How fast or slow the shutter opens, allowing light to hit the sensor of the camera. The longer the shutter is open for, the more light that is let in. This is referred to as a long or slow shutter speed, depending on how long it stays open. The faster the shutter closes, the less light is let in to your camera.
The shutter speed typically is displayed as 1 over another number. Such as 1/200. To put it simply, that is the amount of minutes, seconds, miliseconds that the shutter is open for. If you’re shutter is set at ¼, that means your shutter is going to stay open for a quarter of a second. That doesn’t seem like super long, but when you consider a shutter speed that is set to 1/250, which allows your shutter to stay open for only one two hundred and fiftieth of a second (which is only four milieseconds), you start to get a better idea.
Okay, let’s talk about how shutter speed works in a few different lighting scenarios. If you’re in a dark room with minimal lighting, your camera needs to adapt to use that light source. Your camera can do this by keeping the shutter open for longer to let more light in. You need a slower shutter speed. But when you head outside where it’s sunny, there is wayyyy more light that your camera needs to adjust for. You’ll need that shutter to let less light in so you don’t wind up with an overexposed photo…you need you shutter speed to be faster. Each lighting situation calls for a different shutter speed.
Here are some of my shutter speeds for common lighting situations I work with:
When you add additional light such as a strobe or flash to the situation, you can use a slower shutter speed without worrying about motion blur or noise. Want to find out what those two things mean? You can learn all about it (and the rest of the exposure triangle) in Photography 101! Enrollment opens up October 25th!
