Shutter Speed ?

TFT

TFT

VIP Member
Ok all you smart people, help me out on this one please.
I posted in the "Unedited pics" a river in flood using "Auto" mode, but while there I tried playing with the "shutter speed" and "exposure" to try and take a pic of the water leaving a trail, and failed miserably. I really need an idiots explanation to help me understand the basic principles of doing this.

I've googled and read the manual but sometimes the explanations are assuming that I am way ahead of basics, which I'm not.

Please bring it on people. :)

EDIT: BTW, I have just got a Fuji Finepix S5800
 
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Can you please post the picture?

Are you trying to have the water blurred?

Shutter speed is how long you open the shutter meaning how long the sensors are hit by the light. The higher the shutter speed, the darker the picture. The lower the shutter speed, the brighter the picture.

If you want to leave a blur or a trace, here is what you can do:

Set shutter speed to a few seconds. That'll make the picture bright. To correct that, set the F/stop (or aperture) to a higher number. F/stop works like this: Take the diameter of the lens, that's F/1. F/2 will be the diameter of the lens divided by two. That means that less light will be allowed in if you have a higher number.

So basically you need to balance between lower shutter speed and higher F/stop.
 
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Not blurred, no
I was here and took this pic in "Auto Mode" and was quite happy with that, I then wanted an effect like this second picture I've just grabbed off the web so I played with the "shutter speed" and "exposure" in Manual mode but failed.

EDIT: I posted before your edit :) yes, that was the problem the photo was turning out over exposed.

My pic



The effect in this picture is what I attempted afterwards but could'nt

 
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TFT said:
Not blurred, no
I was here and took this pic in "Auto Mode" and was quite happy with that, I then wanted an effect like this second picture I've just grabbed off the web so I played with the "shutter speed" and "exposure" in Manual mode but failed.

EDIT: I posted before your edit :) yes, that was the problem the photo was turning out over exposed.

My pic



The effect in this picture is what I attempted afterwards but could'nt

Click to expand...

That's exactly the effect I was explaining :D
Of course you'll need a tripod to keep the camera steady during the open shutter.
Do you have any questions regarding what I explained?
 
Looking at my camera menu again the shutter settings are making more sense. It shows as 4" maximum to 1000 minimum, to me " means inches but I now know that " means seconds so it is 4 seconds maximum down to 1/1000 second. My normal auto mode picture was 1/158th of a second shutter and 1/160th exposure.

So what would be a good starting point to leave a "trace"
 
Try 2 or 4 seconds with F/16.

If you don't have access to aperture settings, set the exposure to lower. Try out different pictures until you get the right one, it's the beauty of Digital Cameras :D.

If you get over-exposed, set the exposure to darker or the aperture to a higher F/stop.
 
Thanks Punk, making more sense to me now. Just got to get the opportunity to try it out. ;)
 
Shutter speed is how long you open the shutter meaning how long the sensors are hit by the light. The higher the shutter speed, the darker the picture. The lower the shutter speed, the brighter the picture.

If you want to leave a blur or a trace, here is what you can do:

Set shutter speed to a few seconds. That'll make the picture bright. To correct that, set the F/stop (or aperture) to a higher number. F/stop works like this: Take the diameter of the lens, that's F/1. F/2 will be the diameter of the lens divided by two. That means that less light will be allowed in if you have a higher number.

So basically you need to balance between lower shutter speed and higher F/stop.
Click to expand...

That helped me out a lot too, I knew what shutter speed was but I had no idea what that F number is. In my camera it only goes down to 2.7 though, not sure why.
 
skidude said:
That helped me out a lot too, I knew what shutter speed was but I had no idea what that F number is. In my camera it only goes down to 2.7 though, not sure why.
Click to expand...

I'm glad it helped you.

The reason you can't go lower is either because of add-ons on your lens, such as VR or stabilizers. Some manufacturer restrict the aperture without adding stabilizers to make it cheaper.
 
skidude said:
That helped me out a lot too, I knew what shutter speed was but I had no idea what that F number is. In my camera it only goes down to 2.7 though, not sure why.
Click to expand...
The lower the f-stop, the better. f/2.7 is great for a stock lens, the lower the f-stop the faster the shutter can be, which is great in low-light situations.
 
I went out and took some shots to show you the difference, I used a neutral density filter, otherwise the photos at slower shutter speeds would be far too bright.

1/15sec. f/8
115s.jpg


1/5sec. f/14
15s.jpg


1/2sec. f/22
12s.jpg


1sec. f/25
1s.jpg


1.6sec f/25
16sec.jpg
 
Wow yeah the higher the F number and the larger shutter speed makes it brighter, but the effect on the water is awesome.
 
skidude said:
Wow yeah the higher the F number and the larger shutter speed makes it brighter, but the effect on the water is awesome.
Click to expand...
To a point the camera can compensate for the slower shutter speed with a lower ISO and higher f-stop, however once the camera reaches it's maximum f-stop (f/25 in this case), then you will notice the scene being brighter. The effect looks much better on more of a rapid flowing river, this was just close by :P
 
Connor.S said:
Can you not change the F number on some cameras? Or am I just to dumb to figure out how?
Click to expand...
You can't change them on most, if not all point and shoot cameras, just on DSLR-Like and DSLR's.

BTW skidude, those images are not edited at all. I save them in RAW format, so if I wanted to I could simply lower the exposure of the image using Photoshop and it would look much better. Take this for instance:

Before:
Before.jpg


After:
After.jpg


All I did was adjust the brightness/contrast and changed the saturation a bit, however I deleted the original RAW file so these changes were made on the JPEG picture.
 
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