Shutter Speeds?

[annar]

Could anyone tell me what the point of shutter speeds are? I recently discovered you can adjust the shutter speeds on my Kodak digital camera, but I don't understand why anyone would want to wait even longer for the camera to take a picture anyway?! I think I heard somewhere that a slower shutter speed produces better quality or something, though I really don't know.

[JCW3]

Hi there...

Adjusting the shutter speed will allow you to give you photo a more art like touch compared to a point and shoot style camera.

Slow shutter speeds are going to be effective when shooting in low light since you will need to be able to allow the camera to stay open longer to obsord the correct amount of light.

They will be also useful when you doing stream/river photograph and you want to blur out the water giveing a dreamy effect as you see here often.

Faster shutter speeds are good when your working with subjects you need to stop such as sporting events or wildlife. This is also important when using long lenses or shooting at full zoom. This helps keep camera movement down.

The thing I think your not realizeing is even though you change the shutter speed, you must also keep it in balace with your f-stop setting and make sure everything is metering out OK. If not you may end up with a white or back photo. So its not like you can just change the shutter speed and take a photo, you must adjust it to what your meter will allow or the effect you are going for.

I would recommend doing a little search on manual exposures and you will find alot of info.

Also you asked about quality of a long shutter speed. What you will find is most digital cameras are fairly limited on that setting. Usually most cameras go to 15 or 30 seconds, some have a bulb setting which allows for much longer shutter speeds. But with a digital camera the long the exposure the more noise and hot pixels will be present. Its just a part of digital photography that has not been manufactured to its best. BUT you can still create some amazing low light photography work, so dont worry...

[annar]

Many thanks for your explanation, it helped a lot.