Taking the Shot SHUTTER SPEED

Freezing Motion

One of the most common reasons to change the shutter speed is to freeze motion of a running animal (or really anything that is moving quickly). In order to do this, the shutter speed must be very, very fast. There is no universal rule for how fast exactly, but generally speaking, you want the shutter speed to be faster than 1/500th of a second. In order to do so, though, there must be ample light. Thus, shooting a fast-moving object indoors, or at dawn or dusk, is more complicated and difficult unless you are very familiar with aperture settings and ISO settings

This bounding African wild dog is a great example of when one would want to manually change the shutter speed to match the photo you’re trying to take. By setting your camera to 1/500, 1/1000, 1/2000 or even faster, you can get an animal running at more than 15 miles an hour in perfect focus frozen in time. Because this was taken in mid day in sunny Africa, there was plenty of light such that even though the shutter was open for a very short amount of time, enough light could come through to properly illuminate the scene.

By no means is this a perfect list of speeds corresponding to animal movement, but this gives you a general ballpark of what you need given the scene in front of you.

• Walking animal – 1/250 to 1/500

• Fast-walking animal – 1/500+

• Really fast or nearly running – 1/1000+

• Rapid movements like sparring or full running – 1/1500 to 1/2000