Shutter Speed

The shutter is like a small curtain in a camera. It quickly passes over the image sensor and thus only allows light to enter and be absorbed by the sensor for fractions of a second. The faster the shutter passes over, the darker the resulting image. Therefore a lighter image can be created by reducing the shutter speed. A shutter speed of 1/20 of a second for example, will allow more light into the sensor than a shutter speed of 1/40. The shutter in a digital camera is also primarily responsible for effecting the amount of blur in moving imagery. By increasing the shutter speed, the image is being taken so fast that the object in movement has travelled less distance for any blur to be noticeable in a picture.

Slow Shutter Speed 1/50s:
Slow Shutter Speed (1/50s) from Ethan Delaney on Vimeo.
In this video the shutter speed has been reduced to 1/50 of a second. As you can see in the clip, the movement of the light bulb is slightly blurred. The quality of the images captured are therefore lower than in the higher shutter speed video.
I used the rule of ensuring the shutter speed of my camera is faster than the reciprocal of the focal length value (50mm) in order to avoid camera shake which would have resulted in my tests being rendered useless. A shutter speed of 1/50 was also chosen as this is the minimum speed required when previewing moving imagery at 24fps.

High Shutter Speed 1/160s:
Fast Shutter Speed (1/160s) from Ethan Delaney on Vimeo.
In this video the image quality is arguably better despite the higher amount of digital grain than the video above. This grain is the result of the fact that due to the higher shutter speed, less light was able to be taken in by the image sensor, in order to make up for this I had to adjust the ISO and Aperture accordingly to ensure the overall light level was equal to the video above.