Exercise 4. Shutter speeds.

 For this exercise the camera is set on a tripod and positioned so that something moves across the frame several times. A series of exposures are made from the fastest shutter speed to a very slow one. The aperture is adjusted accordingly to maintain the same exposure. The resulting sequence of shots is shown below, labelled with the settings used. With the exception of the last shot all were taken using a focal length of  55mm. The final shot was taken with a focal length of 18mm. The camera was in manual mode.

1sec  f5.6  ISO 100 

0.5sec  f5.6  ISO 100 

1/4 sec  f5.6  ISO 200

1/8 sec  f5.6  ISO 200

 1/20 sec  f5.6  ISO 400

1/50 sec  f 5.6  ISO 800

1/160 sec  f5.6  ISO 1600

1/250 sec  f3.5  ISO 1600

The effect of different shutter speeds can be seen quite clearly in the movement of the pendulum. From this sequence the movement is sharply frozen at 1/50 sec.

Reflections on Exercise 4 Shutter speeds.


Again this fairly straight-forward basic exercise caused me some problems. Initially I planned to use my dogs as the subject, encouraging them to cross the view by throwing a ball. The resulting chaos produced some interesting shots of noses and tails in varying degrees of blurriness but absolutely nothing of any use except having given the dogs a bit of exercise.

As the weather has deteriorated here to wild wind, dark clouds and torrential rain I decided to look for an indoors subject and settled on the clock pendulum which, while not particularly interesting, does demonstrate the desired effects.
My main problem was exposure. I used my 18-55mm kit lens setting the focal length at 55mm. This restricted the maximum aperture size to f5.6 and in order to get enough light I had to keep increasing the ISO. Even then the shots were too dark by the time I got to a shutter speed of 1/160 sec. The instructions were to use the camera's fastest shutter speed but I was unable to get anywhere near the 1/4000 sec that the camera is capable of. I realised that I needed to use the lens's maximum aperture of f3.5 so adjusted the focal length to 18mm to allow this and physically moved the tripod to try to get the same dimensions of the clock in the frame. Even doing this anything beyond 1/250sec needed additional light and an ISO of 1600 which defeated the object of the exercise by creating noise and reducing the sharpness of the pendulum. I tried allowing more natural light and using the room overhead light, and tried the camera's inbuilt flash but all I achieved were lots of reflections on the clock's glass case.

I think I'll have a play with this exercise again, outside. I very much like the effects that can be produced on waterfalls, taking the water from a normal view to a foamy effect so my plan is to find a waterfall and try it out. There must be some in the vicinity after all this rain!

Although I was already aware of the effect of shutter speed the exercise has proved useful in trying out the practice rather than just being aware of the theory. And it's good to know that somewhere down the road I'll be learning about lighting. Lots to look forward to.

2nd July 2012.


Today I found myself by a weir so experimented again with different shutter speeds. Although it was a dull wet day the water reflected the light and I had the opposite problem from photographing indoors in that as I reached slower shutter speeds the shots were over exposed despite reducing aperture and ISO. I feel I must be either misunderstanding something or missing something completely to be unable to compensate so will read up a bit more and may seek advice from my tutor. Here are a selection of today's photos. As I noted previously I like the effect of a slow shutter speed on moving water.

1/125 sec  f10  ISO100

1/2000 sec  f5.6  ISO 400

1/200 SEC  F11  ISO 200

1/5 sec  f36  ISO 100

0.5 sec  f36  ISO 100

1 sec  f36  ISO 100