Sometimes articles or videos about the technical stuff in photography explain things in such a way that it may seem too difficult to understand so I thought I will give you the easiest way to get it. There are three basic aspects of photography: shutter speed, aperture and ISO so keep reading to learn how the first one works.
Today I will tell you what shutter speed is and how to use it properly.
Shutter speed is the nominal time for which a shutter is open at a given setting.
-Wikipedia.
Easy right? Now we know that even google doesn’t want you to understand it.
I found a simple way to understand it myself. Think of a camera as if it was a part of a human body. A camera is like a head that sees what you see, the memory card is like your brain that collects your memories and most importantly the lens is like an eye so it’s basically like a cyclops.
When you’re taking pictures your cyclops is blinking so the shutter is the cyclops blink. You can tell your cyclops to blink fast or slow.
If you’re holding your cyclops and it blinks slowly you need to stand still because every move could blur his vision and the last thing you want is a shaky image. However the blur can be useful for example in panning or tracking photography but that’s the subject for another video. If you want to take long exposure photos make your cyclops sit on a tripod. the cyclops will be more stable and comfortable on the tripod than in your shaky hands.
On the other hand when your cyclops blinks fast he is very focused and the blink is so intense that he can even freeze a fast moving car and at the same time the image will be darker so you need to compensate it with adequate aperture or iso.
Each cyclops eye has it’s own focal length so if you don’t want you image to be shaky you should adjust the shutter speed to the focal length. For example if you’re using a 50 millimeter lens you should set your shutter speed at 1/50th of a second. To make sure that your image is stable I would recommend that you double that number
Now you have an explanation why you took blurry images and how to make them sharp in the future :)