So this is the part where if all you have is a phone camera, you can only sit and read.
Those of you with SLRs or SLR-like cameras, or high-end point and shoots, you have the ability to at least control shutter speed.
Actually, if hyou have a camera phone, you can do this next part. Let’s repeat the from-dark-to-light exercise we did in the exposure chapter.
- Point your camera to something dark
- Quickly move it to something light
- Try to snap a photo before it properly auto exposes.
tk-phonepic
Here’s what I got:
Why is everything blurry? Because your camera phone had to slow its shutter speed to let in more light.
What does shutter speed have to do with artistic control?
So here’s the big difference between your iPhone and your “real” camera.
I set my camera to 1xth speed
My iPhone does this automatically. But there’s a limit and I can’t control that.
Ignore that the iPhone handles low-light poorly. Note that it can’t even when I want it to .
This is the diff.
What is shutter speed?
Shutter speed is simply how fast the shutter of your camera moves. The shutter keeps light out. When it opens, light comes in.
And when it closes, that light stops coming in…and this is usually when the photo is considered “taken”
The faster that shutter open and closes, the less total light comes in. Try blinking your eyes really fast. Now blink them slowly. There, you get it.
What do the numbers of shutter spead mean?
Shutter speed can be paraphrased as: how long the shutter is open and letting light in. A fast shutter speed is 1/200th of a second.
Shutter speed is measured in seconds.
More commonly, shutter speed is fractions of a second.
A shutter speed of 1/100 is, well, 1/100th of a second. Sometimes, to save space on the digital screen, your camera will list this as 100. e.g. 1/2000th of a second will be “2000”. For you elementary school math geeks: the denominator. Or the bottom number.
So a fast shutter speed is a smaller number. A slow shutter speed, like, 10 seconds, is larger.
Wait then, you might ask, how does it list a shutter speed of 2000 seconds? Well, it would probably be 2000" For the most part, you won’t see shutter speeds that slow.
How does shutter speed affect exposure?
Remember how exposure is the amount of light used in creating a photo?
Shutter speed is one way of controlling light.
How do I use shutter speed?
How do I prevent blurry shots?
So there are two kinds of blur.