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Image 1
1/60th of a second

Conscious use of the shutter speed setting on your camera gives you the ability to get more creative with your photographs. Use a faster shutter speed and you’ll freeze action and get a sharp picture. Slow things down and you’ll get all or part of your image blurred and convey motion to the person looking at the photograph. This can be a powerful tool to help you tell the story behind the photo. But first, you’ve got to know what shutter speeds will give you the look you want. Read on.

Rule Of Thumb?

Image 2
1/30th of a second

Right about now you’re probably hoping for some sort of table that lists out shutter speeds, right? Well, unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. You see, unlike many other areas of photography where there are rules of thumb, this is one of those areas that requires experience and gut feeling. The reason is that the slower things are moving, the slower your shutter needs to be. Otherwise you won’t capture much motion. The best way I can think of to demonstrate this concept is through some photos. And I’ll use my favorite model for this article, my son.

Fast Motion

Let’s start out with the first image. This one is my boy on his first birthday, and he got to play with balloons for the first time. He was quite excited, and was whipping his arms around pretty wildly with those ribbons in his hands. I wanted to capture a little bit of that excitement, so I chose a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second, which was slow enough to get his arms blurred, but the rest of his body in sharp focus.

Slow Motion

Image 3
1/100th of a second with flash

On to photo number two. Here’s another one where I wanted to get my boy’s excitement (which would be obvious even without the blur). On this shot I chose a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second. Now with a focal length of 80mm on this shot, the whole image is a tad blurred, but that was okay with me. I chose a slower shutter speed than the first photo because while he was excited, he wasn’t waving his arms very wildly, so more time was needed to capture the motion.

Freezing With Flash

Now on this third photo I’ll shake things up a bit. On this shot I actually wanted to freeze the action rather than show motion blur. The problem was, my house is dark and it’s tough getting fast shutter speeds. So I compromised. I froze the action by using a flash bounced off the wall at camera left (though you can see a tiny bit of motion blur on his right hand). In order to keep the rest of the photo from being too dark, I went for a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second. This way I could balance the flash with the room light, while still keeping the motion frozen. I think it worked out okay.

Freezing Without Flash

Image 4
1/1000th of a second

Lastly, here’s a photo where the action is really frozen. You’ve got to use really fast shutter speeds to freeze water moving through air, and this shot captures that with it’s 1/1000th of a second shutter speed. Of course it’s just for demonstration, this was not a creative decision in this photo. This photo was taken with our Canon SD600 point and shoot camera when we went to the pool one day. But it still demonstrates the point.

Got some of your own photos that convey a sense of subject motion? Let’s see them! Stick your photos in the Sublime Light Flickr photo pool and let everyone join in the fun.