Stuck in a Dream

To avoid over or underexposing your image light is one of the most important aspects to consider when taking a photo. There are 3 things that affect how bright and dark your image will be: ISO, Shutter speed and aperture. Adjusting these 3 things does more than just impact the brightness and darkness levels. In this post we look at the creative results shutter speed has on our images and how it allows a photographer more creative control.

Shutter speed is the duration of time shutter speed is open. Shutter speed is most often measured in fraction of a second. A long exposure is when the shutter curtain remains open for more than 1/30. The shutter curtain on early cameras remained open exposing the plate too light for a long period of time. The earliest images required an exposure time of around 20 min, but by the 1840s it had been reduced to about 20 sec. Photography subject needed to remain completely still for a long periods of time for the image to come out crisp and not blurred by their movement. In class we recreated this experience by taking our own long exposure portraits. We used photoshop to blend our image with a silver plate texture and convert to black and white.

Today the sensors in our cameras don't require such long exposure times, but long exposures are sometime still necessary in low light environments. For the same reason we had to sit still for our long exposures portraits it is important to understand that a long exposure affects motion. This can lead to creative results such as these light paintings where we used color light to paint images that the camera would capture. We had specific people model while others did the light painting.

A short exposure(fast shutter speed) is useful where there is a lot of light available, such as daylight, strobe lights, beach or snow. The effect of a short exposure is freezing action. This is great for animal photography, sports photography, taking photos of children and things that are moving quickly. This can lead to creative results such as catching the for of water and berries dropped in milk, which uses a short exposure.