Ellie House GCSE Photography
Shutter Speed
In photography, shutter speed or exposure time is the length of time when the film or digital sensor inside the camera is exposed to light, also when a cameras shutter is open when taking a photograph. The amount of light that reaches the film or image sensor is proportional to the exposure time. 1/500th of a second will let half as much light in as 1/250th.
Shutter speed can have a dramatic impact on the appearance and quality of photographs, especially when moving objects are involved. For instance a slow shutter-speed often results in a blurred image as the slight shudder of the shutter itself, or the motion caused to the whole camera by the index pressing on the shutter-release button create vibrations that are faster than the shutter itself; this will cause the appearance of the objects in the view-finder and on the photographs having moved when in fact it is the camera tAdjustments to the aperture need to be compensated by changes of the shutter speed to keep the same (right) exposure.
In early days of photography, available shutter speeds were not standardized, though a typical sequence might have been 1/10 s, 1/25 s, 1/50 s, 1/100 s, 1/200 s and 1/500 s; neither were apertures or film sensitivity (at least 3 different national standards existed). Soon this problem resulted in a solution consisting in the adoption of a standardized way of choosing apertureso that each major step exactly doubled or halved the amount of light entering the camera (f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, etc.), a standardized 2:1 scale was adopted for shutter speed so that opening one aperture stop and reducing the amount of time of the shutter speed by one step resulted in the identical exposure. The agreed standards for shutter speeds are: 1/1000s, 1/500s, 1/250s, 1/60s, 1/30s, 1/15s, 1/8s, 1/4s,1/2s, 1s
Shutter speed can have a dramatic impact on the appearance and quality of photographs, especially when moving objects are involved. For instance a slow shutter-speed often results in a blurred image as the slight shudder of the shutter itself, or the motion caused to the whole camera by the index pressing on the shutter-release button create vibrations that are faster than the shutter itself; this will cause the appearance of the objects in the view-finder and on the photographs having moved when in fact it is the camera tAdjustments to the aperture need to be compensated by changes of the shutter speed to keep the same (right) exposure.
In early days of photography, available shutter speeds were not standardized, though a typical sequence might have been 1/10 s, 1/25 s, 1/50 s, 1/100 s, 1/200 s and 1/500 s; neither were apertures or film sensitivity (at least 3 different national standards existed). Soon this problem resulted in a solution consisting in the adoption of a standardized way of choosing apertureso that each major step exactly doubled or halved the amount of light entering the camera (f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, etc.), a standardized 2:1 scale was adopted for shutter speed so that opening one aperture stop and reducing the amount of time of the shutter speed by one step resulted in the identical exposure. The agreed standards for shutter speeds are: 1/1000s, 1/500s, 1/250s, 1/60s, 1/30s, 1/15s, 1/8s, 1/4s,1/2s, 1s