General Shutter Speed Rules

To kind of backpack off of what I was talking about last week, there are a couple general things you should remember about shutter speed when you are just going out and shooting some pictures or video.

One thing you would have to know is if you’re going to need a tri-pod or not. Usually unless you have incredibly steady hands, and shutter speed under 1/30 seconds will have some sort of shake in them picture. This problem only comes up when shooting in low light, during the day the shutter speed should be pretty high on a sunny day.

When shooting action scenes or anything with a fast moving object, you want to use a higher shutter speed to reduce the chance of getting a motion blur in your photo. When the shutter on the camera opens and closes faster, this allows the light that is brought in to be very short and thus capturing a nice crisp image of a fast moving object.  Most cameras have an action mode that automatically speed up the shutter to get the desired images.

For video, there is a rule called “The 180 Degree Rule” for determining the shutter speed. In video it works a little different because the shutter is moving at a much fast rate then during pictures. Now, the 180 degree rule states that you shutter speed must be double your frame rate. If you don’t know what frame rate is, it is the amount of “Pictures” per second that the camera takes and puts together as a moving image. The standard for movies and what I usually shoot in is 24 frames per second, so I would have a shutter speed of 1/48 or greater.