Getting the proper exposure for a “Usable photo”

Brief subject:  Surveillance

My first task is to create a final series of 3 photographs that creatively explore the use of shutter speed to show blurred movement within the image.  For that, I needed to understand what a shutter is, how it works, how to adjust the speed and what the outcomes of different speeds will be on my final photos.

 My first point of investigation was Google. I had a general idea of what I will shoot, but needed to make sure my idea meets the requirements of the brief. I choose my children to be the subject of my photo shoots, and the locations varied from inside the house with different lights, our back garden and the park, where there are shady and sunny points, and the backgrounds keep changing as people walk by, the sun appears and disappears etc.

 My second point was YouTube, where I learned to know my camera and how to use it. I learned about shutter speed, ISO and F point.

Now that I had the basics, I could start playing with all variants to see what comes out of that.

 In all occasions, I either used ISO 200 or ISO 400.

I learned that inside the house, the best shutter speed is 1/10, as it lets enough light in to give a good result. I could have chosen to use the TV option, that allows me to adjust the shutter speed but the Aperture will adjust automatically by the camera, and indeed, I tried taking some photos this way, and although the outcome was great, that was not what I was asked to do, so went back to fully manual.

As I wanted to catch good portraits with blurry background, I mostly used F1.4 or F1.6. The wide aperture allowed a shallow depth and gave satisfying results.

On few occasions, I chose low shutter speed to produce blurry pictures of my son playing with Lego and of my daughter moving her head from side to side. I didn’t use a tripod so the shakes of my hands, although trying to stabilise them on the back of a chair or a table, were inevitable and it shows in the final outcome as well.

On this occasion, I used fast shutter speed (1/30 ) F5.0 and ISO 400