Knowing your shutter speed.

Water Patterns

So how does shutter speed affect your images and what you should know to help achieve the results you are after. Understanding this adjustment will help you tremendously to make more compelling and technically correct images. Most photographers want tack sharp images, but want special effects added to their images to blur water, or any type of movement. Sometimes you just want to freeze the fast action that you are shooting such as sporting events. I will hopefully help you understand how to get the results you want. 

• Fast shutter speeds such as 1000th sec or faster will freeze motion in your image. This is the setting  used for sporting events, birds in flight, children playing, or freezing anything in motion.
• Mid range shutter speeds of  125th sec to 1000th sec are more normal speeds for everyday shooting of still subjects. It is a balancing act between shutter speed, apeture, and iso, with the goal of getting the right amount of light to your image sensor for a proper overall image exposure.

• Slow shutter speeds of 60th of a second or slower are considered slow shutter speeds. Depending on the speed you select will determine how you capture movement in your images, such as blurring water, adding motion to birds in flight, or capturing the movement of clouds. Shutter speeds of less than a second to several minutes are used in this range. Astro and nightime photography are commonly shot in this range. 

It is essential when using slower shutter speeds that you use a tripod so as not to induce motion blur into your images. Good handholding camera techniques are possible, especially with the newer image stabilized lenses, but only can be used at the faster end of the range ( 60th to 15th of a second ). I feel there is no substitue for a good quality tripod while shooting any images in this shutter speed range. 


The Focal Length Reciprocal Rule. This is the general rule used by photographers to know the minimum shutter speed setting in order to avoid shake in photos when it comes to hand-holding a camera.

This idea is to use a shutter speed that is equal or faster than the reciprocal of the focal length. So if you’re shooting at 300mm, ideally you would need at least 1/300th of a second.

For the digital photographers, you will have to find out what’s the crop factor in order to utilize this rule more effectively.

So let’s take a Nikon D7000 paired with a   70-300 mm vr lens and we’ll be using the formula below.

Minimum Shutter Speed = 1/(Focal Length x Crop Factor)

So assuming you’re going at 200mm with the Nikon D7000 that is of a 1.5x crop factor, the calculation would look like

Minimum Shutter Speed = 1/(200 x 1.5)

So your minimum shutter speed will come to

Minimum shutter speed would be 1/300th 


Using this rule can help insure you will always be shooting at a shutter speed that will give you sharp images.


I hope this introduction and short explanation of shutter speed will help you on your photographic journey and shoot more compelling images. Until next time, may the best of light follow you!

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