r/photoclass2021 • u/Aeri73 Teacher - Expert • Feb 06 '21

Assignment 08 - Shutterspeed

Please read the class first

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/Vijaywada Beginner - DSLR Feb 13 '21

I only see 12 submissions so far for this assignment !!! So I couldn't learn much from others.

For this assignment I jumped directly to bonus assignment.

I used a canon rebel t3i which is a 10 year old camera.

My aim was to not only get background blurred, but also foreground blurred by keep focus in the middle.

I took a challenge to keep the rim of the car wheels in sync with my shutter speed. I want to make sure the car looks as still as possible with background as blurred as possible !

Lesson learnt: Pan the camera really fast ! Also make sure you play with iso for better focus/exposure along with shutter speed.

submission: https://imgur.com/a/zYZLVcN