Recently I got inspired by photos taken with open shutter. It is a different art form and you can do amazing things if you are able to control the option on the camera called “Shutter Speed”.
Shutter speed is the length of time, a camera shutter is open when taking a photograph. The amount of light that reaches the film or image sensor is proportional to the exposure time. Shutter speed can be fast or slow (also known as “open”) to catch the motion. With fast shutter speed you can achieve great results in shooting extreme sports or fast moving objects in general. Simply, what fast shutter does is freezing the object you are shooting. The amount of light that reaches the image sensor is very short. This is the reason why when increasing the shutter speed, you need more light.
The other option, and the one for which I would like to explain more is the slow shutter speed, also known as “open shutter”. This option is completely opposite to the one that I have discussed above. Here you don’t catch the motion in sharp, frozen frames. The image becomes out of focus, and every motion happens to appear blurry. And before you ask “Why do we need it if the image is not sharp?” let me explain it to you. This option allows you to shoot in low light, because it uses the same principle like fast shutter, but turned the opposite way. Your shutter is wide open for a long time, in other words, if your shutter speed is set to 3 seconds, the camera will collect all the light that comes in for this amount of time and then produce an image based on the 3 seconds of material that it had collected. Any motion in between those 3 seconds is recorded that’s why it becomes blurry. And the very cool effect that you can achieve is the “drawing with light”. If you have a flashlight and you are standing in front of the camera, you can draw something like a shape with the actual light, and the result can be astonishing. I have uploaded a photo that I took at night with an open shutter, so that you can understand exactly what I am talking about.
Although it sounds really cool and easy, there are some issues that you can face during the shooting. The major one that I had, was the focus. Because of the lack of any light, most of the time cameras have problems focusing if set to auto focus. If you try doing it manually you don’t actually see what you are focusing on and most of the time the result will not satisfy you. The solution I found for this was an option on the Magic Lantern software for Canon cameras, called “Trap Focus”. It allows you to focus on the smallest light source you have in the scene very fast and accurate.
The “Open Shutter” is a great technique to make something different and stunning, so don’t hesitate, go out tonight and try it!
Credit for the photo:
Name- Playing with the darkness
Model- Iww
Hristiyan Stratev – Mediazone Tv & Avid Lab – Senior Lab Assistant
