0:00 Today's video is all about shutter speed. [Music] Hi everyone, welcome to Palto Tech. Today we are talking about shutter speed, specifically on Fujifilm cameras, but you can apply the concepts that I'm about to teach you to any camera. Shutter speed is part of the exposure triangle. And that's because shutter speed affects your shooting in three very distinct ways. Exposure, motion, and sharpness. Exposure is pretty simple, right? I mean, a fast shutter speed, not much time to let a lot of light in. A slow shutter speed, lots of time to blast that sensor. Next is motion. And faster shutter speeds will freeze the motion of your subject, while slower shutter speeds will create motion
0:47 blur. It can literally allow you to see and define objects in space that were previously impossible to look at. So now I have tip number one for you. When you want to freeze really fast action, whatever shutter speed you think it might be, make it even more. Okay? Always just go beyond that. Even if you have to raise your ISO. I don't know how this happened, but my shutter speed dropped to 12500th of a second. It still captured the trails right here, but the plane is soft. I should have had a faster shutter speed. As far as I'm concerned, it was a ruined shot. So my tip again is overestimate a shutter speed if you're trying to capture a fastmoving subject. For nature shots, you never know when the creature, the
1:32 bird, the animal, whatever, is going to suddenly move quickly. Sometimes though, having too fast of a shutter speed can actually be a little boring. Okay, for example, if someone is riding by on a bike, 1 5,000th of a second, no problem. It nailed it. But it would have been a more interesting photo if I had actually dropped down the shutter speed, slowed it down to say 1/30th of a second or 1/5th of a second and then very carefully held the camera and just followed the subject. Here's an example of that exact shot. You can see how the background is more dynamic. It's just another way of doing it that's maybe a little bit more interesting if you haven't tried it. Here's another example of catching and freezing motion. But
2:19 there's two problems with this. The first is that we didn't really catch it great. 1 1,000th of a second. It should have probably been 1 12000th of a second. You can see it's a little soft here. But the bigger problem, at least according to your uncle Pal, is that it's boring. Like this one here. It kind of just has this static frozen look to it. Have a look at this one also. It lacks motion, right? Even though you're freezing it, nothing's blurry, but it's kind of boring. Sometimes it's better to save the frozen in time moments, not for right as they're hitting something or throwing something or catching something, but for their expression. Okay, I think this works better. It's frozen, but you've got expression right
3:06 here. Now, I could have spent time freezing the fireworks and that's what she was looking at Fourth of July, but it was more interesting and it told a better story to capture her expression. Try focusing on emotion and freezing that. Focus on the people looking at the action and reacting to it. However, when you go back to the action, that's the time where you don't necessarily need to freeze everything crystal clear and sharp. I think this is a better shot with a bit of blur. And if you're lucky, you can get the subject motion and the expression of the crazy person in the same shot, like this. Being able to slow down your shutter speed can warp objects. It can add extra areas of light to your image that normally wouldn't be
3:51 noticeable. For this shot right here, I used a shutter speed of 20 seconds. The camera was on a tripod. What you don't want to do is just press the shutter release button because that could jiggle the camera and introduce a bit of motion blur. Okay? So, instead press and hold the disp back button on your camera and pick a custom button that you want to assign self-timer to. Now, when you go to take your shot with your longer shutter speed, then when you go to press down the shutter release button, the camera has two seconds to stop jiggling and get ready before it opens up the shutter and then takes the shot. If you're shooting a scene with a very slow shutter speed, let's say 1 2 3 10 minutes or so, I would actually
4:36 recommend going into your camera into shutter type and choosing electronic shutter. Now, you need to be careful with this because there are certain situations and lighting conditions where you may end up getting rolling shutter. I have a whole video on electronic shutter as well as the other shutter types. Again, I will put a link to it in the description below. When you're shooting with a longer shutter speed and you may not notice that you are starting to blow highlights, it is very easy to do, especially when photographing water. Okay, have a look at this right here. I ended up blowing the highlights out. And that's just simply because I couldn't see on the LCD screen on the back of the camera, which is why you always, always, always need to use your histogram. Slow
5:22 shutter speeds outside, perhaps in sunlight on water, your histogram will absolutely prevent issues like this from happening. There's your main subject, in this case, the ferris wheel, and then there's the stuff in front of it that unfortunately was lit much brighter. If you do not know how to read and use a histogram, guess what? I got a whole video on it. Link in the description below. Okay, another tip for you. When you're shooting with slower shutter speeds and you have something in your scene that is letters, details, numbers, something that is communicating something, you really want to go faster on your shutter speed. Let in less light. Have a look at that. See, that's better. Now, this is too dark. This is too bright. So, you kind of want to be in the middle between those. Maybe like
6:08 this. And I just punched auto right there. Turn down the highlights. Bump up the shadows a little bit. I mean, okay, there you go. So, have a look at the white lettering right here. I mean, you you can read it right here. I'm exposing for more of the scene, but here I'm making sure that every detail of the lettering is visible. Now, I find that when I'm shooting waterfalls or water features, I'll stick around the 1 to 5se second range. A lot of it also has to do with how fast the water is moving as well. For example, here we are on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. And nothing special here. So, what I did here was slow down the shutter speed to 1 and 1/2 seconds. And look at what it did with the water and kind of just this smooth look to it. Something else that I find helpful is that when you're
6:54 freezing an action shot like this, I think it looks better having less depth of field. Right? So you're freezing the action, the subject, the main thing that's happening, but everything else just kind of fades in the background. Versus if you would stop down your lens, say to f22 or something, and everything was in focus, it would just be this frozen still life. It wouldn't look as good. Have kind of that other stuff around it out of focus if you can, like this. So, I've got another tip for you. If you're going to be using slower shutter speeds, you can use slow shutter speeds to remove people. Here's a fairly bad photo of the Washington Monument. And as you can see, there are constantly people walking along here. You see that?
7:41 Now, I cranked up the exposure and the shadows in Lightroom here. Let me show you what it looked like out of the camera. You see that? So, that was about the time of night it was. My shutter speed was 160th of a second. And because that was a relatively fast shutter speed for the dark conditions that I was shooting in, look at what the camera chose for the ISO. 12,800. Lot of noise here. So, what I did next was I increased my shutter speed to 40 seconds. Have a look at that. The people are gone. The longer you have your shutter open, the less you're going to see people or any object really moving in the background. doesn't work perfectly all the time, but when it does, it's great. Another benefit of doing it this way is that you will get
8:27 less noise in your image because your camera is not needing the high ISO. Here's what the image looked like pretty much straight out of camera. I brightened it in post. And if I compare these side by side, I mean, look at that. Granted, I could have changed my f-stop right here. You see, I shot this at f16. Because I increased my shutter speed, I was able to decrease my ISO and I was able to stop down my lens and have more depth of field. Just by modifying your shutter speed, you can improve the other parts of the exposure triangle and ultimately, I think, get a better image. This streak right here was from the lights of a plane taking off at Ronald Reagan airport. But if you zoom in, you can see people because they were pretty
9:12 much motionless, right? staring at the building and standing still and that's why they haven't disappeared. This leads me now to the final way that shutter speed can affect your shooting and that is with sharpness. As you lower down your shutter speed and make it slower, you risk camera shake, right? Which will cause your photos to be blurry. Now, a number of Fujifilm cameras include inbody image stabilization, otherwise known as IBIS. But the problem with IBIS, okay, is that it does not prevent or help solve any problems with subject motion blur. In other words, if you're using a very slow shutter speed, your camera is not on a tripod, you're holding it like this, and you've had, you know, six cups of coffee and you're
9:59 maybe the IBIS unit on the camera will get rid of the camera shake problem. Okay, that may happen. However, if you're shooting autoracing at 1/60th of a second and a car goes, it's going to be blurry. That's subject blur and ibis cannot fix that. IBIS is great for the person holding the camera, you. Okay? It does nothing to fix motion blur from your subject. Before we continue, I need to tell you about Wondershare Recover It. Your SD card is the single most important part of your camera. You can lose it all in a matter of seconds if your SD card gets corrupted or accidentally erased. Fortunately, Wondershare Recover It can recover not only photos, but also videos, audio files, emails, and more than 1,000 other
10:46 types of file formats. And it's not only SD cards that can be recovered, but also hard drives, USBs, and even drones. There is also a special feature that can recover corrupted video files and you can preview your files before recovery so that you only restore the files that you need. You can run it on Windows, Mac, and Linux file systems. It's trusted by over 10 million users worldwide and backed by 20 years of experience in data recovery. So get your photos, your videos, and your peace of mind back. I will leave a special link down below in the description of this video where you can try Wondershare Recover It for free. And now back to the show. I want to now present to you the most important part of this video. And
11:32 it's something I came up with called STARS. And that stands for shutter timing at right speed. What do I mean by that? Let me show you. Have a look at these three photos right here. Each one was shot using a different shutter speed. And I'm actually not going to tell you what the shutter speed is because that is not what I want you to focus on. Instead, I want you to focus on the actual image itself. In all three of these shots, I used a tripod and purposely lowered my shutter speed, but there's different degrees of it. This to me seems like it's too fast. That's the one that had the longest shutter speed. The wheel kind of loses the detail. It disappears. Shutter timing at right speed. So, now let's look at the third image right here, which has the fastest
12:18 shutter speed that I used. And honestly, it's kind of a boring shot. It's more static and frozen. The shutter speed was too fast. This one right here I like the best. You can see detail of the wheel. It's in motion. But I made the common typical mistake I talked about toward the beginning of this video, which is what right here. I didn't pay attention. I blew out these highlights. This was shot at 1/500th of a second, which was enough time to freeze the subject, as you can see. But here's where I think shutter timing at right speed comes in. You're going to have some subject motion blur, which I think belongs in the shot, even at the expense of maybe rendering parts of the subjects out of focus a bit. The idea behind shutter timing at right speed stars is to give you the
13:05 creative flexibility to manipulate the shutter speed and not be locked in to thinking that you always want to freeze action. And that's the takeaway I want you to have from the creative side of this video. Now, before I go and send you on your way, I do want to give you a couple of tips on the actual shutter speed dial. Those are the hardcoded values right on the dial itself. However, you have T, B, and A. Okay? If you put it in T, and I think of T as transfer the control of this dial to another dial or button on the camera, when you put it in T, you can then use the front or rear command dial to control your shutter speed. Right now, I'm using the rear command dial. If you
13:51 want to use the front command dial, here's what you do. Press and hold in the front command dial until you see this. And you see how it's kind of pointing to it right here. And you can see how we already have shutter speed assigned to the rear command dial. Let's put it on the front command dial as well. Now, when I rotate my front command dial, I can control my shutter speed. That's the first advantage. The second advantage of using that T and controlling it with a command dial is that you get much more fine-tuned control and more options over the actual shutter speed itself. Notice how if you rotate the dial, you get either 1 125th of a second and then it jumps to 1 250th of a second and then it jumps to 1/500th of a second and so forth. But if you put it in t and use one of the command dials, have a look at this. 125, 160,
14:41 200, 250, 320, 400, then 500. Basically, you now get 1/3 stop adjustments when you're doing it. Now, on the shutter speed dial, you have an option for B, which stands for bulb. And with B, the shutter will stay open as long as you press and hold down the shutter release button. Now, there's something else you probably don't know about this bulb feature. You need to have your camera in manual exposure mode in order to use it. Okay? If you have any of these set to automatic, it won't work. You must have your ISO dial set to a fixed value. It cannot be put in A for automatic. However, the aperture ring is weird. Okay, there is this. Let me show you. Let's say you've got your ISO dial set
15:26 to a fixed value of 800 and you set your aperture to automatic. Okay, so fixed value for your ISO. Aperture is in automatic. If you rotate your shutter speed dial and put it in the B for bulb mode, you can actually then press the shutter release button and take the shot with bulb enabled, but the camera will force it to last only 30 seconds. No more, no less. It's really strange. Watch this. I'll go ahead and press down on the shutter release button with the settings I just told you enabled. It's nice enough to give you a little countdown. I have absolutely no idea why it does this at all, but it does. So, just remember if you want to use bulb, just have a fixed value for your ISO and a fixed value for your aperture and
16:13 you'll be good to go. Oh, and one last thing, actually, if you're in bulb mode, you can't just press down on the shutter release button and, I don't know, wait for the Red Sox to win another series, okay? You are limited to a maximum amount of time of up to 1 hour. There is one thing about how the camera operates when shooting video and manipulating shutter. If you have the camera set to movie mode and you go into your menu, you may see a setting called flickerless shutter speed setting. Two options, on or off. Now, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole right now, but that has to do with your camera's ability to try and make sure that the shutter speed isn't set in such a way that certain frequencies of light would cause flickering in your video. And if you do have it set to on, you may see some kind
16:59 of odd shutter speed numbers, right? Let's say you're shooting at 24 frames a second and your shutter speed is 148th of a second as you normally would. You'd turn the dial to say 1/60th of a second and then rotate the rear command dial to get to the 48 right here. A shutter speed of 148th of a second is perfect if you are shooting at 24 frames per second in video. Now, normally that stays fixed at 48. You see that right there? However, if you enable flickerless, look at that. 50. And it just kind of does its own thing. But that's how you get these weird shutter speed values. If you notice them on your camera, check that flickerless SS setting. That's probably what's causing it. One final
17:45 thing I want to tell you, and that has to do with how Fujifilm cameras handle automatic shutter speed. As you know, the ISO auto setting gives you three options right here. Okay. And in it, you can say minimum shutter speed auto or you can pick a fixed value. One thing I've noticed about Fuji cameras, and I just don't mess around anymore with this, is if you put your shutter speed dial to automatic, you've given up a lot of control over what the camera is going to do based on the scene that you're shooting. Okay? you don't know what shutter speed it's going to choose. And I've noticed that there's a lot of variation in what it does. I never ever put the camera in automatic shutter
18:31 speed for both stills and video. Never happens. What I do, and what I think is actually the most helpful setting of all, this is like the setting to rule them all for people that get Fujifilm cameras, and that is go into your ISO auto setting. I just pick the first one and I crank up max sensitivity to use the entire range of ISO. And that's because I'd rather have a grainy, noisy image with high ISO than a blurry one. And I keep default sensitivity to the lowest native ISO on the camera, which on the XT5 is 125. So now with auto one selected and with the camera now in auto ISO mode, I can set a fixed value for whatever I want for shutter speed. And I take the aperture out of automatic and set a fixed value to that as well. So
19:17 there you go. I've got a fixed aperture control over that, a fixed shutter speed control over that. And the camera will adjust the ISO. Okay. If I'm ever not shooting in manual, which is maybe an eighth of the time, that's the way I have it set up. If you do want to have more control and have the entire thing in manual mode, go ahead and obviously rotate the ISO dial to a fixed value. Keep in mind if all three of these are fixed, then your exposure compensation dial will no longer have any effect. It won't work. So, I get a lot of comments from viewers that want to get started being creative and they feel either intimidated or they're not really sure where to start or they think it's going to cost money, they got to buy a bunch of gear. Not at all. What you can do is
20:05 just pick up a little lighter like this or a little pen flashlight. The key is just having fun. Because once you have fun exploring shutter speed, you're just going down this path and suddenly these creative ideas are coming to you. It won't happen if you're not having fun. Put the camera on the lowest native ISO. In terms of aperture, it really doesn't matter a whole lot. I'll just put it at f5.6. I'll set my focus mode to continuous. I'll keep it on face eye for this test. Screen setup and I'm going to turn off this setting right here. Preview, exposure, white balance in manual mode. It's going to get dark in here and I want to be able to see as much as possible and show it to you. But now I'm bringing my shutter speed down 20 seconds. Okay, so we need to turn the
20:52 lights off. It is a bit dark in here, but you can see me through the camera. If I had had preview, white balance, and exposure mode on, it would be pitch dark. You wouldn't be able to see me like this. So, that's why I did that. I'll go ahead and start this. Okay, so now we're going. Okay, let's see what we got. And there you go. Hi. Admittedly, it's not great, but I did manage to get the letters out to say hi. So, one of your assignments for this weekend is to take a photo like that with a long exposure of say 20 seconds, camera mounted on a tripod, room dark, and if you have a
21:40 cigarette lighter or a match or a little pen light would work, see what you can do. See if you can spell something out. The reason this is important is because you will see real quick and get a feel for how much time you're going to need when it comes to the shutter speed. And once you start to work with it, even in a silly example like this, you'll be more at ease with it. You'll be more comfortable with it, I think. And for this exercise, we are going to use the bulb function. And remember what I said about that. All the other settings in the exposure triangle on the Fujifilm camera need to be in manual for it to work. And in fact, this would be a good time to put back the preview, white balance, and exposure mode. Make sure the camera is sturdy on the tripod. Now, what I'm going to do is put the camera
22:25 on B for bulb. Everything else is a fixed value. We've got shutter speed, bulb, a set value of f5.6 for the aperture, and an ISO of 125. What I'm going to be doing is pressing down on the shutter release, which is now in the bulb mode, meaning that as long as my finger is holding it down, the shutter remains open. So, I'm going to press it down, open up the shutter, and then just zoom in or out, and then lift my finger up, press in and turn. Here we go. Three two one and let go. Okay, that's it. Let's see what we got. Cool, huh? Look at that. One handy tip I want to offer you is that when you're zooming in or out and you're trying this in the B for bulb mode, the best way to do it is to start zooming and then press and hold down the
23:12 shutter release. And don't get all the way to the end cuz you'll knock the camera, right? Make it blurry. Start turning. Press. Then just as you're getting close to the end, let go of the shutter release button. Try it on different lenses and experiment. I realize this is kind of silly and that's the point. Well, thank you so much for watching and I hope you found the video helpful or at least entertaining. And if you did, be sure to give it the like and subscribe. I will see you in a new video very soon. Take care. [Music]
