German Shepherd, and the Importance of Manual Mode for Animals

My parents have a beautiful German Shepherd unfortunately named Kane, and yesterday when I went to visit I caught a few shots of him messing around in the garden.



I wanted to close the aperture down a little (around f/5) to increase the depth of field and get more of the dog in focus, however as always I stayed in Aperture Mode for the first few shots. Even though it was a bright and lovely afternoon, his fur is mostly dark, so my camera picked up on this fact and slowed the shutter speed down to around 1/40th.



Here you can see around his snout there is a little motion blur. This is why it's important to always be aware of your settings; to me, the shutter speed sounded fast enough that I didn't even consider it until I looked at the LCD after taking the first few shots.

The general rule of thumb with shutter speed is to try and keep the speed faster than the focal length you're working at. So with my 50mm lens I should at least have been at 1/50th, or 1/60th to be on the safe side. Even at 1/40th, the dog was moving around so quickly and erratically, there was motion blur.

I realised this eventually and switched into Manual mode, stopping down to around 1/80th:



Similar pose, virtually no motion blur; much better! I also opened the aperture by half a stop to f/4.5 to compensate so the shot wasn't too dark, and the beauty of shooting in RAW is that to an extent, as long as you don't go mad with it, you can correct the exposure a little after the fact.

In retrospect I would still prefer to have stopped the shutter speed down even more, to about 1/100th, maybe bumped up the ISO to 200 to compensate, and taken a step back from the dog to help with the depth of field. We live and learn and it's good for me to think about these things even after it's too late, so I know better for next time.



NOM NOM NOM.

Jargon: The Exposure Triangle Part II -- Shutter Speed

So we've talked about Aperture and its role in the Exposure Triangle, and how to create bokeh using shallow depth of field. The next part of the triangle is the shutter speed.

Where aperture is the size of the opening which allows light into the lens, the shutter speed is the length of time your camera's sensor is exposed to the light. Use faster shutter speeds to capture instant moments and sharp images where the subject (or you yourself) is moving.



In this shot the wind was blowing a little, but where the exposure is set to 1/250th of a second, there is no movement blur.

If the light is low, the shutter speed will need to be increased in order for enough light to fall on the sensor and your shot to be correctly exposed. You can balance this somewhat by opening up the aperture wider (and increasing your ISO... more on this in a later post).



This shot was taken in the evening in my living room -- we only have two 60-watt uplighters lighting the room, and as I had the camera in Aperture Priority mode, the camera automatically chose an exposure of 0.5 seconds. This may not seem a lot but if you're shooting a moving subject or hand-holding the camera it can be an age. I had my elbows propped on the table to reduce hand-shake.

So for moving subjects or bright-light situations, a faster shutter speed is required. You can set your camera to Shutter Priority mode to control the shutter speed and let the camera work out the other particulars.

There will also be instances where you are actually aiming for a longer exposure; because you want to illustrate movement, or during night-time shooting, shooting fireworks or similar.



Here I was actually deliberately trying to capture the movement of the carousel so I switched to shutter priority mode and stopped down to 1/8th of a second. I wanted to go for longer but the shots were coming out way over-exposed even with the smallest aperture. Normally in long-exposure situations you absolutely MUST use a tripod (to avoid movement blur due to hand-shake) but miraculously I managed to stay still enough for this.

So, to capture crisp blur-free shots, a faster shutter speed is required (and wider aperture to compensate the light). To illustrate movement or shoot outdoors, a longer shutter speed is needed.

Next jargon post will be on ISO.