Technical Assignment #1 Shutter Speed

Due Tuesday:
Your assignment  is to take a series of photos using your full range of shutter speeds. In order to achieve this, you will have to change your shutter speed (of course!), aperture, and ISO as needed. Use a tripod, otherwise all the photos taken with a shutter speeds below 1/60 will become progressively more blurry. Find something/someone that can repeat a movement such as someone jumping, dancing, bouncing, spinning, twirling, trying to fly, etc. You are to take the same photo (as much as possible) using all the shutter speeds that your camera offers.This way, you can see how the change in shutter speed changes how the motion is rendered.

Start by determining the correct exposure. For example, let's say you start with f32 @ 30” using ISO 100. You need to change your aperture and/or your ISO each time you change your shutter speed. When you change the shutter speed to 15”, the camera only requires 1/2 the amount of light so you must either change your aperture to f16 or your ISO to 200.

Your exposures must be reciprocal (they should all be the same in terms of brightness). As such, the histograms should be nearly identical for all the shots. You can go by full stops; you don’t have to include fractions stops. So, it is likely that you camera has a range of 30 seconds - 1/4000 of a second.

Most of you will have a subset of the following shutter speeds. Just worry about these standard whole stop shutter speeds (don’t worry about the fractional stop shutter speeds such as 1/50, 1/40, etc.)

1/8000

1/4000

1/2000

1/1000

1/500

1/250

1/125

1/60

1/30

1/15

⅛

¼

½

1”

2”

4”

8”

15”

30”

You may find that you can't do this assignment outside in the daylight because you may find that your camera will overexpose the image when using very slow shutter speeds even when using even when using your smallest aperture (likely f32) and your lowest ISO (likely 100 or 200). Given that and that it is very cold outside, you might find it easiest complete this assignment inside.

Here are some nice examples of how a change in shutter speed changes how motion is rendered. 

Below is a photo of the whiteboard from Thursday's class featuring the notes from the shutter speed demonstration.