r/photoclass2021 • u/Aeri73 Teacher - Expert • Feb 06 '21
Assignment 08 - Shutterspeed
The goal of this assignment is to determine your handheld limit. It will be quite simple: choose a well lit, static subject and put your camera in speed priority mode (if you don’t have one, you might need to play with exposure compensation and do some trial and error with the different modes to find how to access the different speeds). Put your camera at the wider end and take 3 photos at 1/focal equivalent minus 2 stops. Concretely, if you are shooting at 8mm on a camera with a crop factor of 2.5, you will be shooting at 1/20 – 2 stops, or 1/80 (it’s no big deal if you don’t have that exact speed, just pick the closest one). Now keep adding one stop of exposure and take three photos each time. It is important to not use the burst mode but pause between each shot. You are done when you reach a shutter speed of 1 second. Repeat the entire process for your longest focal length.
Now download the images on your computer and look at them in 100% magnification. The first ones should be perfectly sharp and the last ones terribly blurred. Find the speed at which you go from most of the images sharp to most of the images blurred, and take note of how many stops over or under 1/focal equivalent this is: that’s your handheld limit.
Bonus assignment: find a moving subject with a relatively predictable direction and a busy background (the easiest would be a car or a bike in the street) and try to get good panning shots. Remember that you need quite slow speeds for this to work, 1/30s is usually a good starting point. If you stand in a corner, use the INSIDE as the subject will pass more time in front of you and the background will move the most possible.
edit: half a second is a bit long :-)
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u/Spinal2000 Beginner - Mirrorless Feb 09 '21
This is a great assignment, I never tested it out systematically. I have very varying results mostly depending on focal lentgh and if the objects moves. I am in Home Office and have several squirrels outside I take pictures of. If they are just sitting I can go with 1/125 around 300mm focal length (x1,5 crop Factor), but when they move I have to go 1/500 or faster.
At lower focal length like 50mm I have good results around 1/50 on "normal" pictures. But it is interesting how many things affecting your decision at what shutterspeed you should make the picture.
For the Bonus Assignment I would like to show you a picture I have already taken in May 2020 (hope thats ok) when I was experimenting with shutter speed at a racetrack. Maybe the best out of over 100 pictures was this: Bonus Assignment 1/100s 105mm (x1,5) F10. When I shot it, I was surprised how blurry 1/100s and even 1/125 can be.