shutter speed
I was contacted by Planar two months ago to make professional commercial photos of their LED panel displays products they installed in a call center in Hobbs, New Mexico. However, Covid-19 soon shut everything down and it took until now for it to be safe to travel to Hobbs and finally make the photos. To make these images I knew the challenge would be how to capture the bright LED displays in a dimly lit space.
Read MoreCool things can happen when you leave the shutter of your camera open for more than just a fraction of a second. Look around the photo above where I left the shutter open for 10 seconds. In that time I managed to capture 3 lighting bolts, and the light trails made by the head and taillights of passing cars. Plus, the long exposure created a starburst effect with the street lamps.
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Florida high school baseball action shot using aperture priority - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/4 ISO 320 1/3200I am a self-taught photographer with a careful ear for picking up photography knowledge from a variety of sources. If you browse my work you can see that you can teach yourself to make photographs that people will eventually pay you for. However, I spend a long time grinding away teaching myself, starting with making thousands of images in Japan over a 6-month period when I first got a DSLR, then for several years back here in Florida. I would not recommend this method! That is why I have been offering 1-on-1 photography lessons to teach people in 2-hours what it took me 2+ years to formulate and define. Taking a lesson or class from a competent photography teacher is a great way to jump start your shooting skills.
So the weekly photography tips I post on this site are part of sharing the practical photography knowledge I gained grinding through those years out in the field, and the knowledge I continue to increase by now shooting paying jobs as a full-time pro photographer.
In this post you can see action and sports shots that span this window of knowledge.
The baseball photo above was made I believe on my very first sports assignment, so you can say it is the epitome of beginner's luck! Looking at the settings I used for the shot I would definitely yell at myself for that now. I was shooting action in aperture priority, probably never the best choice, had my ISO at 320 during daylight, and the shutter speed was way faster than it needed to be.
Horse jumping in Venice Florida - Aperture Priority - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/5.6 ISO 400 1/1600Early on in my time in Florida I also photographed horse jumping a good bit. You can see by my settings I was making progress, even though still using aperture priority mode. My ISO was still above the minimum even during daylight, but if I recall at that time I thought I needed that very fast shutter speed of 1/1600th to freeze the action, and to get a good exposure I had to increase the ISO. Clouds would come and go and settings often needed to be tweaked, but choosing aperture priority and letting the camera adjust the shutter speed on the fly was definitely not the way to go. I should have been using shutter priority mode.
Triathlon cycling in St. Petersburg Florida - Manual Exposure - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/4 ISO 640 1/1250Now we are jumping ahead two years to when I photographed the St. Anthony's Triathlon in St. Petersburg Florida. I was now comfortable and competent shooting action & sports in any exposure mode. Why did I choose manual mode then? At this time the cyclists were coming by in consistent light (no sun going behind clouds). I was photographing them as they passed by the exact same spot on the road too, therefore there was only one set of settings that produced the best exposure. So I locked those in with manual exposure mode. Why did I use the settings I did? Well the cyclists were going really, really fast so 1/500th was not freezing them, so I used 1/1250. I used f/4 because that fast shutter speed required I let a lot of light in, but I wanted to retain some depth of field and better sharpeness, so I did not use the maximum aperture of f/2.8 of my lens. So having aperture and shutter speed restricted by the nature of the subject matter, to get the exposure I wanted I then had to increase my ISO to 640. This was not the middle of the day, but rather just shortly after sunrise. As the sun went up, I could gradually decrease the ISO I was using.
Pelican in flight - shutter priority - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/5.6 ISO 200 1/1250In this pelican shot you can see my full progress in shooting action shots. I was using shutter priority mode, had my ISO at its lowest setting, and set the shutter speed to be plenty fast enough to freeze even the bird's wing tips. The camera was choosing the aperture for me on the fly, and getting consistent f/5.6 results allowed for very good sharpness and depth of field.
So now I would recommend using only manual or shutter priority mode for sports and actions shots. If no lighting conditions are changing, then lock things in with manual. If lighting is changing due to shifting cloud cover, or the subject moving across different foreground and/or background light, then use shutter priority mode.
Of course the minimum shutter speed to use for any action shots, or any moving subjects, is 1/500th and you must also use AF-C (Ai Servo) focus mode. Both of those are musts. As you can see from my above examples, though, other settings and parameters remain variables, and there may be multiple ways to get the same shot, but some settings combos are much better to use than others!
If you are photographing a still subject, you should be shooting in manual mode with your DSLR (if you do not know how, I offer 1-on-1 photography lessons that will). Therefore, you have an aperture you want to shoot at in order to get the best DoF for your subject. So if your initial shot does not have the exposure you want (underexposed or overexposed), then you should adjust shutter speed first in order to fix the exposure, not aperture or ISO.
In my example photographs above, both images are straight out of the camera at the exact same settings, save for the shutter speeds. At 1/500th the image is underexposed, which is not surprising since at default daylight settings I only recommend 1/320th as a max shutter speed and today is very overcast with a tropical storm passing by (note the dock is almost underwater!).
I did not change my aperture as I want to maintain the DoF f/11 offers, and I did not adjust the ISO as I kept that set at the lowest in order to maintain the best image quality. On pretty much every DSLR, even if it has only one dial on the camera body, in manual mode that dial defaults to shutter speed for a reason...because you change shutter speed the most often. In the photo of the dock, I adjusted the shutter speed from 1/500th to 1/125th to get the exposure I wanted, leaving all other settings the same.
So remember when shooting still subjects in manual mode, adjust the shutter speed first in order to fix any exposure problems.
When using an external flash mounted on your DSLR's hotshoe, the camera's meter is telling you the exposure for the ambient/background light. So if your subject is standing in the shade, then you should meter off of the background light to set your shutter speed. The aperture setting and speedlight power will be the exposure settings for your subject. Essentially, the camera's meter does not know you have a flash on and are going to use it to expose the foreground subject (person, etc). In shade especially, the subject should not be metered off of for setting the shutter speed.
So when setting up an an external flash shot with it mounted to your DSLR's hotshoe, even before the subject is in place set your shutter speed to expose the background light properly. Now place your subject where you like and set the aperture and flash power to exposure the subject correctly, and your previously set shutter speed will take care of exposing the background properly. Try this methodology the next time you use your external flash. Of course, your DSLR should be set to manual mode, as well as your external flash.
Continuing my default DSLR camera settings series, in the above shot you can see the settings that I set my Nikon to as soon as I step indoors anywhere. I am often asked by people, what settings should I use for such and such a situation, and it is always hard to tell them because slight variations in light, subject, etc. can have a big effect. However, in my experience I pretty much always use these settings along with my external flash on my DSLR in any indoor shooting environment:
aperture: f/5.6
shutter speed: 1/60th
ISO: 800
For the settings on your hotshoe mounted external flash, most of the time I find a manual power setting of 1/4th is good for lighting the intended subject and allowing the speedlight to recycle fast enough for successive shots.
As you can see the first shot was in a dark ballroom, and this shot is in a fairly well lit office, yet I used the same settings. These default indoor settings with an external flash will not light up a large room, but will still expose the subject well (the dancers) and if the room does have good lighting and is not too large, the default indoor settings can light up both the subjects and the background.
So the next time you are shooting indoors, give these settings a try and you should be very happy with the results!
My DSLR photography students often ask me what settings should I use? Well, that is a very hard question to answer as there are any number of factors that would determine how one would set the five settings necessary to produce a well exposed and sharp shot. So for this photography tip I offer my default sunny day settings. If it is a sunny day, before I leave the house I would set my DSLR to the following in general:
aperture: f/11
shutter speed: 1/320th
ISO: (lowest for your camera)
Of course there are factors like what lens you are using, what type of subject, etc., etc., but if you are looking to make a shot like the one above on a nice sunny, Florida day, try starting with the default settings above.
