Creative Shutter – Freeze the time

The Shutter is not only a component of the Exposure Triangle used to achieve a Correct Exposure. There is more to it than just enabling the photographer to adapt to a given situation where either it lacks light  (like Night photography), and you increase the Shutter speed, or you have too much of it (like shooting at noon), and you need a very fast Shutter speed. All this is just the basics of the Shutter, but there is a far more interesting side of it: The Creative Shutter. As a matter of a fact, just like the Aperture, the Shutter a fantastic power of its own. It can either freeze time of implying motion in your photography. In this episode, we tackle the Freezing Time aspect. To demonstrate this I have conducted a small experiment that anyone can do from the comfort of his/her house. All you need is some light (desk light, light stand….), a steady tripod, a dish with some water in it and a plastic bag filled with water hanging above the dish, and we that we pierce to get water drops right on the lower dish. The goal is to capture the precise moment the water droplets hit the water in the dish. Regarding the exposure setting it is pretty simple:

The Shutter Speed

If you are going for some constant light ( Not a flash gun, strobe, Speedlight), then chances are you will need to use your popup flash (unless you have a lot of light source i.e 500W construction lights). Every camera has a speed limit beyond which one cannot use the popup flash, and this is called the Sync Speed, and we will review it in another episode. This limit is usually 1/250sec. Therefore we are going for a Shutter Speed of 1/250sec.

The ISO

Unless you have a lot of light, you might need to increase your ISO. In this experiment, I lacked some light. Hence, I raised my ISO to 1000.

The Aperture

Here the choice is yours, and you might just want to use it as a compensator to obtain a correct exposure now that you have set up the two other factors (Shutter & ISO). I chose 5.6 as it is the widest I could get with my 18-135 Canon Lens. Note that while setting the correct exposure is quite easy once you know what each factor does, capturing the exact moment the droplet and the main water meet is the real trick here. I needed 4-5 trials for each good picture. Here is what I got (these shots have not been edited and could have done with some cropping):

The golden colour comes from a golden reflector I had placed behind the dish. Since my popup flash bounces off it, it brings some mood to the pictures. You can use any backdrop you wish as far as it is bright to reflect the light. This type of shot would normally be done with a Flashgun/Strobe to really freeze the action better and be able to use a lower ISO setting. IN those pictures we can see some noise and while they are well exposed they do lack some brightness for my liking. I invite you to try this since the result is quite interesting, similar to those images that your Computer OS usually comes with and that everyone uses for Desktop background or screen save. It is so much fun to make your own, isn’t it!