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Photography Lesson #5 Shutter Speeds

Understanding the shutter speed and how it effects your image is a key component to making special effect shots.  When you shoot at a low shutter speed you can make trails and manipulate blurs in your images.

When you want to make this type of effect make sure to use a tripod.  Shooting these type of shots require a solid base or else you will have too much hand blur.


How to spot images where you use slow shutter speeds:

There are standard images but if you understand that something is moving when other objects are still in your framing then you can make some amazing effects.  Here are a list of images you can shoot that will give you a great effect.  Cars at night, Smoke from cigarette, rain drops, led lights, subway car, bus stop.

You can also manipulate this effect in the opposite manner.  Have an object remain still and everything else move around the object move.  Example:  Personal stands still while cars move in background.   A person stands still in a crowd of people.

If you have a timer on your camera then you can shoot for hours with the shutter open.  By doing this you can shoot long trails of the stars in the sky.  You can also do some hand held shutter speed trick shots by knowing how the shutter speed works.

When shooting hand held, a good rule of thumb is to keep the shutter speed at twice the focal length.  Example:  If I have my lens set at 35mm then I would shoot at around 1/80th shutter speed.  If I have my lens at 100mm then I would shoot at around 1/200th shutter speed.

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