Photography: Advanced Shutter Speed Technique

Photography: Advanced Shutter Speed Technique

As we mentioned earlier a slightly overexposed or underexposed photograph may have been desired by the photographer. Generally speaking you're going to try and achieve a balanced and realistic exposure result. However, there may be times when you want to break the exposure rules of balance. Our philosophy here at Icon Photography School is that it's okay to break the rules of photography; you just need to ensure you know the rules first.

A great example of an overexposed photograph which adds an element of artistic flare to a piece can be seen below.

Notice how this picture being overexposed adds an element of mysteriousness. The washed out look of the female model and against the washed out walls simplifies the photograph and places extra emphasis on the red tones the model is wearing.

For those of you who are just being introduced to these manual controls for the first time will require a lot of patience while practicing finding the balance between shutter and aperture control. Setting both manually will take great care, quick decision making a good memory. However, for those of you who don't want to jump head first into the world of manual control, you might want to look into cameras that have certain priority settings. For example, many cameras have two features commonly referred to as:

Shutter speed priority and Aperture priority

What these settings allow you to do is to alter one of the settings (i.e. aperture) while the camera will automatically set the other setting (i.e. shutter speed) to achieve a balanced exposure level. This will allow you to play with your aperture settings and learn about depth of field without having to concern yourself with the proper shutter speed setting to offset the increased amount of light coming in from the wider aperture (shallow depth of field). It will also mean that fewer of your photos will get over or under exposed. The same is true for shutter priority. You can manually edit your shutter speed to play around with showing movement within a photograph without having to worrying about setting the proper aperture to accompany you're shutter speed setting. You can effectively control one manual element while the camera automatically controls the other for an optimal exposure setting.

Other photography pages of interest

Setting camera exposure
Advanced shutter speed technique
Different camera lenses
Photography color theory
Photography color wheel