Lesson Info
7. Shutter Speed Basics
Summary (Generated from Transcript)
The lesson is about understanding shutter speeds in photography. The instructor explains that shutter speeds are listed in fractions of a second and not whole numbers, and he gives examples of different shutter speeds and their corresponding exposure times. He also discusses the concept of full stops and how they affect the amount of light in a photograph. The instructor explains the history of the EV (Exposure Value) Scale and how it relates to changing shutter speeds. He also mentions the option to set third stops in some cameras and explains the use of X-SYNC and bulb settings. The lesson concludes by discussing the technical and aesthetic reasons for choosing different shutter speeds in photography.
Q&A:
What are some common misconceptions about shutter speeds in photography?
Some people get confused about the fractions used to represent shutter speeds and may think larger fractions indicate longer exposure times, when in fact the opposite is true.
What are full stops and how do they affect the amount of light in a photograph?
Full stops refer to doubling or cutting in half the amount of light in a photograph. For example, going from one second to two seconds doubles the exposure time and doubles the amount of light.
What is the EV Scale and how does it relate to shutter speeds?
The EV Scale is a system used to measure light in photography. It assigns a number to indicate the amount of light available in a scene. Each increase of one on the scale represents a doubling of the light, and this concept is related to changing shutter speeds.
Can shutter speeds be set in third stops?
Yes, some cameras allow for setting shutter speeds in third stops, which provides more precise control over the amount of light in a photograph.
What are the technical and aesthetic reasons for choosing different shutter speeds?
Technically, a faster shutter speed can be chosen to let in less light, while a slower shutter speed can be chosen to let in more light. Aesthetically, a faster shutter speed can be used to freeze motion, while a slower shutter speed can be used to blur motion.
Lessons
Class Introduction
23:32 2Photographic Characteristics
06:46 3Camera Types
03:03 4Viewing System
22:09 5Lens System
24:38 6Shutter System
12:56 7Shutter Speed Basics
10:16 8Shutter Speed Effects
31:57Camera & Lens Stabilization
11:06 10Quiz: Shutter Speeds
07:55 11Camera Settings Overview
16:12 12Drive Mode & Buffer
04:24 13Camera Settings - Details
10:21 14Sensor Size: Basics
18:26 15Sensor Sizes: Compared
24:52 16The Sensor - Pixels
22:49 17Sensor Size - ISO
26:59 18Focal Length
11:36 19Angle of View
31:29 20Practicing Angle of View
04:59 21Quiz: Focal Length
08:15 22Fisheye Lens
12:32 23Tilt & Shift Lens
20:37 24Subject Zone
13:16 25Lens Speed
09:03 26Aperture
08:25 27Depth of Field (DOF)
21:46 28Quiz: Apertures
08:22 29Lens Quality
07:06 30Light Meter Basics
09:04 31Histogram
11:48 32Quiz: Histogram
09:07 33Dynamic Range
07:25 34Exposure Modes
35:15 35Sunny 16 Rule
04:31 36Exposure Bracketing
08:08 37Exposure Values
20:01 38Quiz: Exposure
20:44 39Focusing Basics
13:08 40Auto Focus (AF)
24:39 41Focus Points
17:18 42Focus Tracking
19:26 43Focusing Q&A
06:40 44Manual Focus
07:14 45Digital Focus Assistance
07:35 46Shutter Speeds & Depth of Field (DOF)
05:18 47Quiz: Depth of Field
15:54 48DOF Preview & Focusing Screens
04:55 49Lens Sharpness
11:08 50Camera Movement
11:29 51Advanced Techniques
15:15 52Quiz: Hyperfocal Distance
07:14 53Auto Focus Calibration
05:15 54Focus Stacking
07:58 55Quiz: Focus Problems
18:54 56Camera Accessories
32:41 57Lens Accessories
29:24 58Lens Adaptors & Cleaning
13:14 59Macro
13:02 60Flash & Lighting
04:47 61Tripods
14:13 62Cases
06:07 63Being a Photographer
11:29 64Natural Light: Direct Sunlight
28:37 65Natural Light: Indirect Sunlight
15:57 66Natural Light: Mixed
04:20 67Twilight: Sunrise & Sunset Light
22:21 68Cloud & Color Pop: Sunrise & Sunset Light
06:40 69Silhouette & Starburst: Sunrise & Sunset Light
07:28 70Golden Hour: Sunrise & Sunset Light
07:52 71Quiz: Lighting
05:42 72Light Management
10:46 73Flash Fundamentals
12:06 74Speedlights
04:12 75Built-In & Add-On Flash
10:47 76Off-Camera Flash
25:48 77Off-Camera Flash For Portraits
15:36 78Advanced Flash Techniques
08:22 79Editing Assessments & Goals
08:57 80Editing Set-Up
06:59 81Importing Images
03:59 82Organizing Your Images
32:41 83Culling Images
13:57 84Categories of Development
30:59 85Adjusting Exposure
08:03 86Remove Distractions
04:02 87Cropping Your Images
09:53 88Composition Basics
26:36 89Point of View
28:56 90Angle of View
14:35 91Subject Placement
23:22 92Framing Your Shot
07:27 93Foreground & Background & Scale
03:51 94Rule of Odds
05:00 95Bad Composition
07:31 96Multi-Shot Techniques
19:08 97Pixel Shift, Time Lapse, Selective Cloning & Noise Reduction
12:24 98Human Vision vs The Camera
23:32 99Visual Perception
10:43 100Quiz: Visual Balance
14:05 101Visual Drama
16:45 102Elements of Design
09:24 103Texture & Negative Space
03:57 104Black & White & Color
10:33 105The Photographic Process
09:08 106Working the Shot
25:29 107What Makes a Great Photograph?
07:01Lesson Info
Shutter Speed Basics
Alright, we're gonna get to one of my favorite sections, and it's one of the most basic but also one of the most fundamental and important sections to photographers, and that is understanding shutter speeds. Conceptionally, it's pretty easy but there's a little, little nuances that you need to be very, very good at here. So this is an answer yourself quiz on this one, and the question is, which one of these two numbers is larger? Now that may seem like a very easy question. Nobodies pulled out their iPhone to, like, which number is larger? Google this, which number is larger, and we don't even have to think about these things, right? We're not gonna pull out any calculators to do this. We immediately know eight is bigger than two, but in our cameras when we talk about shutter speeds they're pretty much always listed in fractions, but the thing is, is the camera isn't telling you they're fractions, it's assumed that you know, and a lot of times people get confused, it's like oh wait it'...
s bigger, oh wait no it's reverse, cause we're doing reciprocals here, it's one over eight. An eight of a second is a smaller amount of time than a half second, and so just be aware that when you're looking at shutter speeds they're actually fractions of a second in most cases. So we've got our list of shutter speeds here, and if you were to look through the viewfinder of your camera, you at home take your camera out, look through the viewfinder, turn the camera on. I don't care what mode it's in, but usually the first number on the left, what does that mean, it's first number on, that means it's probably a really important number. So that's gonna be your shutter speed. Now in some cases, like Canon, Nikon, they'll say 2,000, or 500, and it's really 1/2,000th, 1/500th. Some of the new mirrorless camera, which have, shall we say better displays with more graphics, will actually tell you it's 1/500th, so you need to learn what your camera does. Remember that from the beginning of the class? You need know how to work your camera. Alright, so here's our list of shutter speeds. Now, I guess I should stop at this moment and explain that shutter speed is a terrible name. It's completely misleading, the speed of the shutter does not change in your camera, it always, at least I believe, I don't know. I believe it operates at exactly the same speed for every single shot. It's the difference between when does the first one open, and the second one close. That time difference, that exposure time difference, is the difference between these shutter speeds, and so it might help, conceptionally, to think exposure time, how much time is the sensor exposed to light, alright? I always like to start simple, so I think all of you know what one second is. That's about a second right? Alright, so we all know what a second is, when we go to two seconds, we've double the amount of time and we've doubled the amount of light. It's a linear scale, it's a one for one trade off here and so if we want it longer, we get twice as much light in that way. Now this is something that we're going to talk about, full stops. It means we've doubled or we've cut in half, and so when you hear someone talk about a full stop, that means they want it twice as bright or twice as dark, depends on what other words they say, whether they wanna go up or down in that direction. So to double, or to cut in half. The longest shutter speed on many cameras will be around 30 seconds. Not really much reason for it, other than when you go to one minute, well that's a whole different numbering system there, so 30 seconds is kind of a nice number, but some cameras are going well beyond that now. When we get up to a half second, it's half as much time, it's half as much light. Same scale, it works the whole way up and down. Now it gets kind of interesting here, because I know there's some very passionate people here, in politics and in math, right? Some of you are fraction people, and some of you are decimal people, I can just tell, let's not have any arguments in here, but sometimes your camera might say two. Some cameras say two, which means 1/2. Sometimes, some cameras say zero, quotation, five, and it says quotation not point because they're too cheap to put a point in there, they just use the quotations that were there and so that's 0.5 and they mean the same thing, they're both half a second, and so that is gonna be a full stop, less light than one second, because it's half as much time. A pretty normal shutter speed is one 1/60th of a second, but remember when you look in your camera it's gonna say 60, it's not gonna say 1/60 in most cases. The top shutter speed on most cameras is gonna be about an eight thousandth of a second, and so this is the range of shutter speeds that you're likely to deal with. Now something that we don't need to know, but I wanna share with you some of the history of why this doubling is like this in photography, and photographers used to judge everything on the EV Scale, Exposure Value Scale. They wanted to come up with a light metering system for photographers so that we could figure out, give me a number and I will figure out what shutter speeds and apertures I want, and so I remember I used to own a Hasselblad camera and they had an EV setting on there, and you could keep it at EV eight, and you could have shutter speeds and apertures of this, or shutter speeds and apertures of that, you could change it around, so it's one simple number that tells you how much light you are receiving. Right now, we don't use this, we usually say, well it's 500, 2.8 ISO 800. That's kinda a lot of words here, and so they used to measure light on an EV Scale, and EV zero is roughly ISO 100, f/1.4 at one second. Which was kinda the darkest situation that they imagined photographers ever getting involved in, and this was way back when they invented the scale which, I don't know, might have been in the 20s or 30s, I haven't done my research on this one yet, and so that's really dark. Now when you go to one from zero we're doubling the light, and so every time we go up one on the scale, we're doubling the light. There's a great difference between when it's dark and it's light and this is how we can do this. Indoor room lights, I've often found are around 6. I have a light meter that actually reads this out in EV. So you wanna go outside in a nice day in Seattle, that would be a cloudy day, that'd be 12. You wanna go outside on a bright sunny day, that's gonna be around 15, but the scale doesn't limit here, you can go as far as you want. If you wanna have a really bright light and get your light meter camera right next to it, it could be really bright. It could also go into the negatives, which there's like negative light? No, it's just that they've based zero on this setting, and they didn't foresee cameras being able to record in darker situations, and so some cameras will be able to autofocus at EV minus four, or EV minus five, which I don't know exactly what that is but it's really dark, it's not nothing, it's just really, really dark, it's not very much light there. So this is an EV scale, and if you get a handheld light meter, that's usually one of the options you can put it in EV readings or shutter speeds and apertures type readings, and that's how we kinda got to this whole changing by a full stop, and so we can change our shutter speeds by a full stop here. Now as you actually dial your shutter speed on your camera, changing these settings, you'll notice that you can get to third stops, and that's because photographers from time to time, like to be very picky and precise about what they're doing, and so we can set third stops. Well what about quarter stops, what about tenth stops? Why doesn't my camera have tenth stops on them? Well, not really necessary. If we were to look at two photos, and one photo just the smallest amount brighter that we would all say it's brighter, but barely anything at all, that is about a third of a stop right there. A stop brighter is gonna be, okay that's noticeably brighter than this one, it's like a baby step, and so if you need to set a tiny third of a stop, perfectly fine, I don't like listing them because it clutters up my screen with too many numbers, so I'm gonna stick with the whole numbers as we go through the rest of the class. There's a few cameras out there that have something called an X-SYNC, X is kinda your nickname for flash, your flash synchronization, and so some cameras you can dial in a special number for the flash synchronization. Let's say you like the flash to fire at 1/125, you could dial that in and have that set. What a number of cameras have is a bulb setting, and bulb setting refers back to the old days of photography where they had a cable release and they pushed it in on their big view camera and it left the shutter open, and so they might be Ansel Adams there, you know for 30 seconds holding the exposure open and then when he took his finger off, it closed the shutters. So it's any length you want, and it's gonna typically only be useful over 30 seconds, things you wanna leave open for a long period of time, all the modern cable releases have a lock on them so if you wanna leave it open for five minutes, you don't have to use your thumb , you can just kinda turn it on and lock it in, so that's for night time exposures. Now why are we gonna choose shutter speeds? This is the real thing, technical reasons, we wanna let in less light we're gonna choose a faster shutter speed, if we wanna let in more light we might wanna choose to let in that with a longer shutter speed. But for aesthetic reasons, we might wanna freeze motion with a faster shutter speed, and we might wanna blur motion, yes, sometimes we like these blurry in photography, we're gonna choose a slower shutter speed for it, and that means we have two different motivations, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that, and sometimes these are in conflict. Artistically you wanna do something in your photograph, but technically it won't work, so you gotta know the ways to work around it. So there's a lot of things involved here, and just knowing what these do is the first step on it.
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a Creativelive Student
Love love all John Greengo classes! Wish to have had him decades ago with this info, but no internet then!! John is the greatest photography teacher I have seen out there, and I watch a lot of Creative Live classes and folks on YouTube too. John is so detailed and there are a ton of ah ha moments for me and I know lots of others. I think I own 4 John Greengo classes so far and want to add this one and Travel Photography!! I just drop everything to watch John on Creative Live. I wish sometime soon he would teach a Lightroom class and his knowledge on photography post editing.!!! That would probably take a LOT OF TIME but I know John would explain it soooooo good, like he does all his Photography classes!! Thank you Creative Live for having such a wonderful instructor with John Greengo!! Make more classes John, for just love them and soak it up! There is soooo much to learn and sometimes just so overwhelming. Is there anyway you might do a Motivation class!!?? Like do this button for this day, and try this technique for a week, or post this subject for this week, etc. Motivation and inspiration, and playing around with what you teach, needed so much and would be so fun.!! Just saying??? Awaiting gadgets class now, while waiting for lunch break to be over. All the filters and gadgets, oh my. Thank you thank you for all you teach John, You are truly a wonderful wonderful instructor and I would highly recommend folks listening and buying your classes.
Eve
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