DSLR Simple Tips - Using Shutter Speed (Shutter Priority/ TV mode)

After some tweaking and trying around .. got some hang of shutter speed in DSLR's .. for those who are thinking what is this shutter speed ? Its the amount of time you want light to enter the lense  .. or in other words if you are comparing with human eye.. amount of time between two blinks. its represented by TV on Canon DSLR .

Lets take 3 examples of same object, in this case - Tram

Image below is captured using higher shutter speed ,  Second is a bit lower shutter speed and third one is even lesser

Image 1(Freeze the object) - 135 mm , Shutter speed of 1/160 

If purpose is to freeze the object, then increase your shutter speed ..  as you can see in image above, higher shutter speed is used and viewer will feel that the object was still, but tram was moving when the picture was taken.

Image 2(panning)  - 35 mm, 1/6 of a second shutter speed

And as seen in picture above, we can show that the object is moving by blurring the background , this technique is called panning where in we use a low shutter speed and follow the object for few seconds in the direction object is moving even after the picture is taken.. Viewer will get an effect that object is in motion.

Image 3 (light trails) -  35 mm , 6 seconds shutter speed

As seen above, if you want to capture the light trails of moving object then decrease your shutter speed even further. this gives a bit of artistic look to the picture.

So, with a bit of playing with shutter speed and you can capture motions of objects in a different ways.  Dslr's have shutter speeds of about 1/6400 th of a second to 30 seconds .. i.e you can allow light to enter in your camera between these ranges (or even more ranges in some cameras) .  if you want to freeze a moving object then a higher shutter speed will help,and similarly when you want to show motion then lower the shutter speed.

One thing to note is if you want to capture a picture with less then 1/6th of a second , then its suggested to either use tripod / place camera on a flat surface as human hands tend to shake and and picture might appear blur.