Unlock the perfect shots! What's the best shutter speed to capture movement?

Are you getting blurry images when taking photos? Don't blame the camera - it could be your settings that are the problem. Here's the secret to unlocking perfect shots of movement

Are you getting blurry images in your photos? It may not be the camera that's a problem, it could be the settings that you're using. Here's the secret to unlocking perfect shots of movement.

Hi, my name's Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography.When I'm running my switch to manual workshop, which is aimed towards beginners, I ask what people want to get from the session, and quite often people are telling me that they're getting blurry photographs. So what I'm going to do today is to show you how we can get super sharp images by using one of the three elements of exposure, the shutter speed. If you've not looked at the exposure triangle, or in my case, I call it the exposure see-saw, have a look at this video and you'll understand everything about exposure in just about 20 minutes.

So today I've got one of my neighbors, Toby, he's going to be running in front of the camera so we can show different scenarios and what the correct shutter speed is to freeze the motion as somebody's walking past, running past, or sprinting past the shot. So, let's jump into it.

If I was hand holding this camera today, I'd need to stop the movement of my body and the heart beating, which is what usually causes camera shake.And there's a rule of thumb to stop camera shake from happening, and that rule of thumb is look at the focal distance of your lens, and in this case, it's 105 millimeters. Put that number under one to make it a fraction, and that's the shutter speed that you can hand hold this lens and camera combination. We don't have a 1/105th of a second in a camera, but we do have 1/125th.So that's going to be what I call my hand hold shutter speed. So I'm going to take the first set of images using this hand hold shutter speed.

Okay, so let's shoot Toby just walking past at 1/125th of a second. Okay, so I'm going to zoom into this picture now, so I'll take one of the shots and I'll get Toby just in the middle of the frame.And at 1/125th of a second, if I move into the picture, you can see that Toby's head is blurring. So his movement is going faster than what the shutter speed's capturing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the shutter speed.I'm going to take the shutter speed from 1/125th up to 1/250th.And by moving it to 1/250th, you can see that's reduced the amount of light that's coming into the frame. So I need to compensate for that. And the way I'm going to compensate is by increasing my ISO and increasing it from 100 to 200. Okay, Toby, if you want to do another walk across the frame.

I will shoot this time at 1/250th of a second, and let's see what effect that's had on the picture. And again, I'm going to get Toby back into the middle, and we'll zoom into the picture. And you can still see the some blurriness in this photograph.So what I'm going to do now is increase the shutter speed again. I'm going to take it from 1/250th up to 1/500th.Remember, if you reduce the amount of light coming into the shutter speed, you need to increase the amount of light coming in, in this case through the ISO.So we'll increase the ISO to 400.

And Toby, one more walk just across the scene. 1/500th of a second. Let's see what's happening.It's going to zoom into the scene. And you can see we've frozen the movement of Toby as he's walking through the scene. So a good shutter speed for walking is going to be 1/500th of a second.

Now let's see what happens when Toby's running. So Toby, can you just do a gentle jog for me across the scene? Okay, so that was a gentle jog that Toby was doing. I'm just going to move him back into the middle of the frame. Zoom in and you can see there's a little bit of movement inside of here. So with a gentle jog, 1/500th of a second isn't going to freeze the motion. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to take that shutter speed up to 1/2,000th of a second. We're allowing two stops less light to come into the frame. So I'm going to increase the ISO by two stops, taking it from 400 up to 1600. And now Toby's going to do one more slow jog just across the frame. And now at 1/2,000th of a second, if we zoom into the picture, we can see we've got a lot more sharpness in the image. So for a slow jog, something like 1/2,000th of a second.

But what happens if we've got somebody who's running really fast, you know, like a sprinter? Let's see what 1/2,000th of a second does then. So Toby, if you can just do me a sprint just across the scene. So that was great running from Toby. And let's zoom into the picture. And we can see we've got a little bit more blurriness come back into the scene. So again, at 1/2,000th of a second where we've got a real fast sprint, that's not capturing the movement. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to push the shutter speed as fast as I can in this camera, which is to 1/8,000th of a second.Okay, so Toby's going to run across the scene, do a sprint, and we're shooting a 1/8,000th of a second with an ISO of 6,400. Okay, now let's have a look at the photograph, and as you can see, all that motion has been frozen.

So there we have it. Three different ways of capturing motion when somebody's walking, somebody's doing a slow jog or somebody's doing a fast sprint. Just to give you a recap, 1/500th of a second is going to freeze the motion of somebody's walking through a scene.1/2000th of a second is going to freeze the motion of somebody jogging.1/8000th of a second is going to get super sharp pictures of somebody sprinting through a scene.

It'd be great if you could add comments below the video to tell me what you thought of today. It would be superb as well if you could like the the video - that way a few more are going to get to see it. I'm going to return to the subject of movement. I'm going to show how we can blur movement in different ways. I'm also going to show how we can blur and freeze at the same time. And the best way to make sure that you see my videos is by subscribing, which you can do down here.

My name's Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop.This has been Coffee Break Photography.I'd love to see you next time. Bye bye.