Tuesday Tips & Pics - Shutter Speed Lesson from Salt Spring Island

I’m sorry I’ve been so absent on my blog this week, I’ve been up in Canada, on Salt Spring Island on vacation and there is no Internet here! In fact, in order to post this I had to drive 45 minutes into town to sit at a coffee shop with wifi. Ahhh it feels good to have wifi :)

This week I thought I’d talk about the very basic principal of shutter speed. As you all probably already know, changing your aperture, or f-stop, is used to control depth of field, and changing your shutter speed is used to control motion. Generally, people like to keep their shutter speeds fast to freeze motion and get a sharp, clear image. But sometimes it’s fun to slow down your shutter speed to show motion.

One way to do this and still keep the still parts of your image in focus is to use a tripod. I used a tripod for the two shots below. This, by the way, is the view from the house I am staying in in Canada. I took my tripod out and for the first shot I closed down my aperture to f/20 and used an 8 second exposure. I also had my ISO as low as possible. With this setting, you can see the motion in the water, and it smoothes out to make a glassy surface.
  f/20, 8 seconds, ISO 160

For the second picture I wanted to do a faster shutter to compare the difference.It was pretty dark so I opened my aperture up to f/4.5 to let in more light and bumped my ISO up just a tiny bit and had 1/5 second exposure. This is still fairly slow so its good I was using a tripod and not hand holding it, but it was fast enough to freeze the water.
  f/4.5, 1/5 second, ISO 320

Both of the images are properly exposed but one shows the motion of the water more than the other. This is how you use your exposure with purpose to make sure you are getting the affect you desire.

Now link up what you’ve been shooting below! I may be behind on commenting until I get home next week, but I’ll get to them all, I promise! (I have 362 unread items in my google reader, so bear with me!)