Photographing movement: Shutter speeds

Shutter speeds from fastest (top left) to slowest (bottom  right)

With the camera mounted on a tripod and the 24-105mm lens fitted, I set out to explore shutter speeds. After some thought and I bit of investigation I decided to set up along a stretch of road near where I live and photograph the cars going by. This is in a thirty mile per hour speed limit so I was hoping for some reasonably consistent speeds. The weather was very bright and sunny which will of course have a bearing on the exposure.

I usually use my camera on full manual, so this was a good opportunity to try shutter priority for a change. It was interesting to see that the camera light meter varied the exposure quite a bit. Maybe because of the colour of the cars?

I started the experiment at my fastest shutter speed of 1/8000. Wow! Not enough light for that! Slowed down to 1/2500, 1/2000 and finally 1/1250 which was starting to give a correct exposure.

The blue car in the first image was shot at 1/1000. As can be seen this is absolutely sharp. This is the slowest speed at which the movement is frozen. The next image at 1/500 is starting to show a little blurring on the wheels whereas at 1/250 this has become quite pronounced. The wheels are showing signs of blurring before anything else due to the extra speed of their rotation.

From 1/200 to 1/80 the car has become fairly blurred and finally when we get to 1/50 and 1/30 the car is becoming very blurred.

I have further shots at slower speeds but as the smallest aperture of my lens is F22, the shots get progressively brighter. When the shutter speed gets to 1/5 the car is little more than a streak across the frame. The image is very over exposed though.

This was an enjoyable experiment with a few 'hidden' variables such as the speed of the cars and the exposure set by the camera's auto metering. It was also useful to experiment with the shutter priority as well as the aperture priority in the previous exercises. In certain situations this may prove a faster way of 'getting the shot' than the full manual setting.