Take Your Camera Off Auto: Part 1 - Shutter Speed

Shutter speed.
ISO.
Aperture.
Exposure triangle.

When I got my first camera, I didn't have a clue what those were. I'm pleasantly surprised at how good some of my pictures turned out when I didn't know what I was doing and my camera did all the work for me.

If you're a new photographer or a mom with a camera and you want to be able to go off automatic mode, I'm going to try and help explain some basics.

There is something called "the exposure triangle". It is composed of shutter speed, ISO, and aperture working together. Those three things determine the exposure of your photograph; how light or dark it is.

Shutter speed is, I think, the simplest, so we'll start with that. Your camera has a shutter inside of it that opens and closes to let light in to the sensor. The speed of the shutter determines how much light is allowed to reach the sensor.

On your camera, the shutter speed is indicated by a fraction (most of the time). The number is a fraction of a second. I try to keep my shutter speed no lower than 1/60th, so one-sixtieth of a second. (Note: my camera is on manual mode here).

The brighter it is, the faster your shutter speed can be, because there is plenty of light available. If it is darker, you need a slower shutter speed, because your camera needs time to "draw in" the light. That's how I like to think of it.

Here's my goofy way of thinking about shutter speed. I think of the shutter as kind of like a vacuum, sucking in light. In darker situations, there isn't much light available, so the shutter needs to be open longer to find more light to suck in. If it's midday and the sun is high in the sky, there's a ton of light around and and it can just open and shut quickly and get all the light it needs.

One more thing to think about with shutter speed is movement. Shutter speed is essential to having your pictures crisp and sharp. The faster the thing you are photographing is moving, the faster your shutter needs to be in order to freeze the action.* Going back to my general rule of thumb, the biggest reason I try to keep it no lower than 1/60th is because of camera shake from holding my camera. 1/80th is probably better, but sometimes you can't help it.

In summary, shutter speed determines how much light is allowed to reach your camera's sensor. This part of the exposure triangle is crucial to your photos being sharp and crisp. The faster your subject is moving, the faster your shutter speed needs to be.

I hope that made sense and was helpful! I haven't been in photography that long, but it's so freeing to be able to know what your camera is doing and how to take control for yourself and I want to help other people do that too.

If you have any more questions about shutter speed, leave them in the comments! Scroll down for some examples of shutter speed from an assignment I did when I was learning about this!

*Unless your goal is to have blurred movement, which can look cool. It just depends on what you are trying to do.

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You should be able to see that the faster the shutter speed, the action is frozen more. The slower shutter speeds have a blur to them. Also, the slower ones are brighter, but that is part of the other things we'll get to in other posts.

(Please ignore the stuff behind the water! I hadn't learned to pay attention to my backgrounds yet, haha)