Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Your camera’s Shutter Priority (Tv) mode gives you control over whether a subject’s motion is sharp or blurred.
When shooting with telephoto lenses the old school rule was to use shutter speeds that are the equivalent of the reciprocal of the lens’s focal length and it’s till a good place to start. When using a 300mm lens, for example, 1/250th of a second makes a good starting point but I typically use 1/500th of a second to ensure sharpness.
Unlike Program mode (the “P” does not stand for professional) you should make sure that the available aperture range is sufficient to provide a correct exposure at the selected shutter speed. Depending on your camera, if the aperture value flashes in the viewfinder and LCD panel, it means the selected shutter speed is too fast or too slow for an adequate exposure. (Even my old Canon A-series give some indication of this.) That’s when you should select a different shutter speed until the aperture number stops flashing.
Tip: If shutter speed isn’t matched to the speed of the subject’s, some blur will be seen in the image, not that’s always a bad idea. Totally sharp, still image of a race car on a track makes it look like it’s parked, not racing.
How I Made this Shot: An ALMS race car was photographed at Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca using a Canon EOS 20D with the inexpensive ($199) Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III lens (at 75mm.) Exposure was 1/250 sec at f/4 and ISO 800.
The direction of motion is also an important factor in getting sharp images. For example, if you want the movement of a person is walking at an average pace at a distance of a little over 16 feet from the camera to be frozen, use the following shutter speeds as reference points:
- 1/500 sec for movement perpendicular to the optical axis
- 1/250 sec for movement on a diagonal
- 1/125 sec for movement parallel to the optical axis
Tip2: If the object is moving faster, the exposure times have to be correspondingly shorter. If you want blurred movement, longer exposure times are required.
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