Shutter Speeds and Aperture

Shutter Speed

What is it?

Shutter speed is just pretty much what it says on the tin, it's how long and fast the lens is exposed to light. For example 1/50 which is the standard for film and photography the numbers basically mean that the sensor within the camera will be exposed to light from the scene for a fiftieth of a second before snapping for the next one for however long the shot will be.

But these speeds do have another effect and that's the effect of motion blur, if you use freeze frames or just viewing footage then you can see that there's a definite blur within the movement captured. As an example of this I have attached some screenshots of two frames from two different shutter speeds, one at 1/60 and then another at 1/125 so that you can see the change between them.

In this image you can see that there's some blur occurring alongside the motion making it difficult to pick out details within the object.

Whereas in this image there's a more significant amount of blur even with things such as the forearm which doesn't feature that much movement within them.

So this shows how important the shutter is within film and how even a small change to the frames can have a massive impact upon the quality of film that's then made and left at the end of the production.

Now onto the Aperture.  Now I have covered this previously but not to an extent where I feel that it would be useful, so the way aperture works is by controlling the depth of field through controlling light flow to the sensor. The bigger the aperture (the lower the number) the more blur will be in the image and vice versa.

These diagrams have a mush clearer version of this method and how it all looks. 

So as you can see the aperture plays a rather big role in how the clear and bright an image is but it also helps you play with what ranges are available for your shots giving you the ability to get more meaningful ones or more focus on one character.

Here's an example of some aperture tests that I did:

As you can see from these shots in order of brightest to darkest the higher the number on the aperture the more clarity you get from your image but the overall brightness is lowered whereas the lower the number gives you more brightness to light the image with but some of the image will be lost or blurred out.

Hopefully now you understand that with aperture the general ruling is the higher the better but be prepared to fiddle with your light set up but if you go lower you may need to adjust your subjects range to the camera.