Shutter Speed

Besides ISO and aperture, shutter speed is one of the basic things everybody should know about photography. It is usually used to create extraordinary effects by either freezing or blurring motion.

Generally, shutter speed, often also referred to as 'exposure time', is the amount of time the camera shutter is open to expose light. When the shutter speed is fast, it helps to freeze a subject in motion.

When the shutter speed is slow, on the other hand, it creates an effect where the object in motion appears blurred and harder to recognize.  Slow shutter speed is often used in car advertisements or when taking pictures of city lights, to show the movement.

Usually, shutter speed is mesured in fractions of a second. 1/4, for instance, would be a quarter of a second, whereas 1/250 would be two-hundred-and-fiftieth of a second.

 

1/4

1/100

1/250

So on these example pictures that I took, I used three different shutter speeds, 1/4, 1/100 and 1/250, and one can clearly see that the faster the shutter speed the clearer the picture gets .

Whereas in the first picture with the very slow shutter speed, one can hardly recognize the water jet because it is so blurred, the last picture shows a very clear and focused image of the water in motion.