Amateur photography shutter speed and creative photography
Shutter speed controls how fast the shutter opens and closes. Dah! Right? But no matter how basic that sounds it is a third of the recipe in creative photography. Aperture is the size of the opening you have your lens open to, f stop, shutter speed is how much time the lens opening lets in light through that lens opening.
Let me analogize this with something we use everyday and that is a faucet. We will use the kitchen faucet for this example. The pipe that carries the water to the faucet is the lens, in this house we have different sized pipes that we can use to hook our faucet up to. The faucet is the shutter and the pipe diameter would be the same as an f stop in our camera lens.
The faucet is the shutter. Never mind about film speed ASA, or sensor sensitivity ISO at this point. So if we had the biggest diameter pipe hooked up to our faucet there is more water traveling to the faucet, if we could move at super human fast speeds and open and close the faucet as quick as we can a shutter in a camera, then if we held the faucet (shutter) open for a second we would get some water from the pipe (aperture. Remember we said the widest pipe, so this lens would be say f4.0), lets say a cup of water is allowed through, then two seconds we would get two cups, a half of a second and we would have ½ a cup per this example.
Now if I haven’t lost you yet, let us say we now connect our faucet to a smaller diameter pipe, meaning there is less water allowed to flow to the faucet. So aperture is the roundness (size) or diameter of the opening, it has an inverse relationship to the number. We all would rather have a hundred dollars than one dollar so intuitively a beginner is going to think a f22 would be gigantic and a f4 would be super small, however it is inverse to that form of thinking, a f22 aperture is smaller opening than a f4 aperture.
So if we go back to the faucet we can get a gallon of water from either opening. Right? It is a matter of time. This is how an exposure is determined also. We can let in the same amount of light in, we have many options.
These options are called exposure equivalents. That is the science of creative photography, how you dial up your exposure will do different things to your image, this is the artistic side of photography.
So your first question you would ask is “what exposure should I use Michael?” The answer I give everyone is “the correct one!!!”
Aperture controls what area is in sharp focus, which we call depth of field, the larger the aperture the more area of the lens is collecting photons, tons of photons lets in light off the outer part of the lens, these random photons are what causes the blurry affect we call bokeh. The narrower we concentrate the photon beam the more concentrated the beam becomes and lets in fewer of the random photons and the sharper the image becomes. We use this to draw the viewer’s eye to the subject and for artistic interpretation. Human eyes are naturally drawn to the in focus area of the image.
Shutter speed is used to freeze action, or convey movement. A fast shutter speed can stop the motion of a bullet, where as a slow shutter speed the bullet is invisible. As a professional photographer, or an amateur photographer we use the combination of aperture and shutter speed to convey our creative photography interpretation of that moment we click the shutter button.
We will stop here with this thought. Again it sounds confusing because at first it is confusing. Practice makes for a better photographer, not the camera or the cost of the equipment.
Enjoy your journey as we all become better at seeing the light and becoming better photon writers.
Michael Knapp
Irresistible Images
Photon writer. (photographer: English for the Greek words)
06-03-2011