Shutter Speed Effects
For our second weekly assignment, we were asked to research shutter speed and aperture effects, using the TV and AV modes on our DSLR cameras. Since it was going to be a very picture heavy post, I thought I'd split it into two.
WHAT IS SHUTTER SPEED?
According to this article on photographylife, shutter speed is one of the three pillars of photography, the other two being ISO and Aperture.
"Shutter speed, also known as “exposure time”, stands for the length of time a camera shutter is open to expose light into the camera sensor. If the shutter speed is fast, it can help to freeze action completely, as seen in the above photo of the dolphin. If the shutter speed is slow, it can create an effect called “motion blur”, where moving objects appear blurred along the direction of the motion. This effect is used quite a bit in advertisements of cars and motorbikes, where a sense of speed and motion is communicated to the viewer by intentionally blurring the moving wheels."
FREEZE
Put simply, the faster the shutter speed is (1/4000 is the fastest on my camera), the less time it takes to capture a shot. Fast shutter speeds allow you to freeze motion, and is hence great for sports or wildlife photography, or pretty much anything that you want to capture exactly at that moment. The downside to this is, the faster the shutter speed is, the less time there is for the picture to be exposed to light. Hence, using very high shutter speeds can result in dark pictures.
Some examples of fast shutter speeds at work:
In order to attain my freeze photos, I took a photo hunting trip to GBK (Gelora Bung Karno) during Car Free Day. You might remember GBK from one of my sketch hunting trips there. There were a bunch of people playing tennis about, so I thought, why not? I asked them if I could take pictures (the key to taking good pictures is to not give a damn whether or not people think you're weird, just live through the lens). They agreed, and perhaps felt a bit show-off-y as well. I went from 1/30 and slowly went up to 1/1200, at which point everything just looked too dark.
Position of light matters a lot, it turns out. In the first picture below, I took it with the sun directly behind me. However, in the last picture, I took it with the sun on my left, plus it was getting cloudy. Although the higher shutter speed played a factor in the darkening results, I fiddled around with it and it didn't make much of a difference---it was the position of the sun.
Click on image to enlarge.
Later that day, I tried capturing freeze shots with a high speed racing bike. Yep, that's a 48-year-old man sitting on an MV Agusta, going at 150-160 km/h. However, the circumstances just didn't work out. The bend was surrounded by trees on both sides, and not a lot of lighting made it through. When I did adjust the shutter speed to let more lighting in, the pictures became blurry. The bike was just too fast to capture it in decent lighting.
Here are some of the shots I picked out for the Freeze effects:
MOTION BLUR
Motion blur occurs when we're using low shutter speed, 1/30 and below. The slower it is, the more light gets exposed to the diaphragm. Hence, the term "long exposure photography". This mode is commonly used in low-light settings, on when we want to capture the movement of objects. Generally, as long as the object moves faster than the shutter speed, it will become blurred.
Some examples of motion blur photography:
Again, I explored the GBK for motion blur shots. The first one was of a little boy who was riding his bike along the tennis court. I experimented by going with 1/30 and then decreasing it from there. The lower the shutter speed is, the more light is exposed, as you can see in the over-exposure in the fourth picture.
When shooting long exposures, tripods are a must. This is because the slightest shake of the camera will indeed be captured by the low shutter speed. In the first two pictures below, you can see the blurry background caused by a moving camera, even though I used a tripod in both of those! The third picture was captured in an extremely low shutter speed in broad daylight---it is indeed blinding.
Here are some of my favourite results, I especially love the train ones:
PANNING
Panning is a bit like motion blur photography, in that it uses a relatively low shutter speed to capture blurred motion. However, whereas in motion blur, the object is blurred and the background is sharp, panning is the opposite.
To create panning shots, the object must be sharp while the background is blurred. To do this, the camera must move at the same direction of the moving object, and at the same speed. Some examples:
Some of the other kids used tripods to achieve panning shots, or simply stood at the roadside and move their camera to the moving object. However, I didn't think that would work, or even if it did, it would yield very limited results. So, I used a car. Whenever an object came by on the my side of the lane, I would try to match the speed, roll down the window, and take the shot. In the first picture below, you'll see that the car was going to fast for the bicycle, hence everything was blurry. The second and third shots were technically successful, but I didn't like the compositions. In the fourth shot, I wondered if I could capture panning whilst directly behind the object (turns out I can't).
Here are my favourite panning shots. Note that the man on the bicycle was going pretty fast (for a bicycle), especially since he noticed my taking pictures (was he trying to outrun the camera, or was he showing off?) And yes, the man on the motorcyle was my 48-year-old father. Kudos to that man.
In the last shot, I also tried to incorporate some dutch tilting to create a more dramatic speeding effect (falling over to the right side of the picture). Read more about my dutch tilting experiments here.
Overall, I think this was a really great exercise because I learned how to make my pictures more dynamic.